Comment by _fat_santa
2 days ago
The article makes it seem worse than it really is. All they seem to be doing is moving that functionality from being the default to an option that you enable.
Personally I heavily rely on the middle click to paste, especially with my docker workflows. Rather than having to click "CTRL+SHIFT+C" then "CTRL+SHIFT+V" every time, I just know whatever is highlighted will get pasted when I hit the middle click button. It's a subtle difference that saves maybe 1-2 seconds but combine that over the course of months and all of a sudden I've saved myself an hour with more efficient copy/paste.
Well, the source article is from El Reg, where objectivity is something to eventually strive for, but if it gets in the way of clicks, facts are definitely not a friend.
And, somehow, that strategy seems to keep working decade after decade. Yeah, I don't get it either...
After I’d been in the firing line for a couple of Reg articles I started realising that yes, they don’t let much stand in the way of a good story. They still write a good story though, it’s just slightly more tenuously tethered to reality than I’d originally imagined.
At least you know what you're getting with El Reg, unlike Very Serious Publications written for Very Serious People. The average article in CIO is also densely-packed bullshit, just polished up more.
It IS labeled "Opinion" in their defense...
But yea, El Reg is never where you go for objectivity.
Not a "normal" option though. They plan to hide it away inside `gsettings` so only power user who already knows about middle-click paste will be able to find it and enable it. This completely destroys discoverability.
And a couple years later it is removed as only a minority used it.
I use both because they use to different software registries to store the information. This allows the CTRL+C content to be different than the middle mouse highlight.
I cannot stand the Windows middle mouse user experience and always prefer the middle highlight and paste method.
You can customise it via Powertoys or some other utilities, though.
I find having two clipboards at the same time to be super handy and I literally use it all the time. Yes, KDE also has a clipboard manager that allows me to do Meta+V and paste from history, but I use the two clipboards way more frequently and it is easier/faster to, anyway.
(Formally, it makes handwavy sense: Having a clipboard with a history is basically a pushdown automaton, but having two of these in one box is not a PDA any more - it's something categorically more powerful, equivalent to a turing machine iirc).
>> I find having two clipboards at the same time to be super handy and I literally use it all the time.
Wouldn't it be great if we could have multiple named registers that we could paste from and even modify?
(vim enters the chat)
Sure. But it's a depreciation and there's numerous similar settings that are only available by tweaking settings manually or using gnome-tweaks. Right now nearly every linux app supports select with the left button and paste with the middle. It's fast, useful, doesn't require a keyboard, etc. Amusingly I've seen various logins block control-v, but middle click works. God forbid you use a password safe with your bank login.
When you use gnome-tweaks there's a ton of "WARNING you may break things" and of course anything off the default path is likely to receive zero testing.
Personally I find middle click to paste one of the differentiators between MacOS, Windows, and Linux. I'm pretty surprised it's not more common. I was amused the iterm2 added select without having to type control-c.
I have it the opposite way. Moving my right hand from the keyboard to the mouse doesn’t save me time - so as with most things: YMMV
Having mouse paste as an option doesn’t remove the fact that keyboard paste is also an option, so that’s really immaterial to the topic.
Are you sure? Have you actually timed this, or are you just using your subjective impression of time.
In Human factors engineering we have known for decades that some things that seem faster are really slower when you time it. We are taught early to never trust what someone says about time, always find an objective way to measure it.
It is why I (right-handed) was tфught by my first boss on first job in 2000s to use left hand for the mouse: secondary hand for secondary task (I'm not designer, artist or pro-gamer, so keyboard is primary tool).
Now I have a big problem with this: there is no good left-handed mouses on the market anymore, and symmetric mouses has right-handed buttons (and no thumb buttons like forward-backward or left-handed side). Buttons can be swapped in OS, but it messed up remote access like VNC or RDP to systems without swapped buttons... So, buttons must be swapped physically. No luck.
Most of the useful keyboard shortcuts are chordable from the left hand. Left mouse is inconvenient for that. I'm lefty and stuck using left mouse periodically due to injuries and I don't love it but it's tolerable. For the mouse situation I just stick to symmetric 3-button mice and never swap buttons so I can change hands or have a coworker use the mouse uninterrupted.
I also mouse left-handed, but it never occurred to me to swap the buttons from the right-handed configuration. It's always been a practical thing. The only mice I'm likely to have within reach at any point are probably right-handed, so I just had to learn that way. Left click with middle finger, right click with index.
I would kill for a true ambi five-button mouse to replace my old Microsoft Intellimouse, but I've run into the same problem, they just don't seem to exist anymore. All five button mice on the market either have both buttons 4 and 5 on the left side for righties, or have a grotesquely unbalanced design in some other way.
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Well, I usually use the mouse to select text. And then I usually use the mouse to put the cursor precisely where I need to paste. So even in a Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V workflow, I'm using the mouse as much.
If you're using something like vim or emacs then yeah I would agree with you but for something like docker commands, there's just no easy way to copy a specific container ID without using the mouse (if there is let me know lol).
My logic is if your hand is already on the mouse, it's going to be faster to paste with a mouse than your keyboard.
> for something like docker commands, there's just no easy way to copy a specific container ID without using the mouse
Some terminals have a mode where you can move the cursor around the history, and allow searching / copying / pasting. Alacritty and tmux come to mind, others may also implement something similar.
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Gnome options have a habit of disappearing. I've followed the project from its conception to the current iteration, used v1 and v2 interchangeably with KDE and eventually moved to Xmonad with whatever applications I need. Gnome 1 was hackish and geeky, Gnome 2 polished off the hackishness and turned an ugly but promising duckling into a fully-functional duck. Then came v3 and with that the opinionated paring-down of options started for real. It became almost obligatory to install one or more 'gnome tweaks' tools to make things work as they used to. Strangely enough this quest for 'simplicity' has forced many Gnome users to (re)turn to hackish tools like gnome-tweaks to make their computers works like they want as opposed to the way the Gnome team insists they should work.
That's a very Windows-y/ Apple-y way to treat one's users. Disappoint. I use KDE though.
Gnome has options?