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Re: RXVT copy/paste behavior
Dave Korn wrote:
The selection model used by rxvt is standard throughout the X11 world.
It's insane.
And it's not necessarily standard either. For example, Konsole on SuSE
does not auto select.
Unless you have the precision muscular control skills of a world-class
gymnast, a mouse always moves at least a little bit when you press
down on the button.
This makes it very tricky to select a new window without
unintentionally erasing the contents of the clipboard that you were
hoping to paste there because the mouse moved just enough as you
clicked it to select a single character and the auto-copy destroyed
your clipboard contents without asking.
It's not quite as bad as that really. Slight movements do not alway
register a selection. It is hit and miss sometimes...
Destroying user data without any kind of confirmation, are-you-sure,
or requiring a difficult-to-type-accidentally key-combination (such as
ctrl-c) is an appallingly incompetent piece of UI design. It's like
having a pistol without a safety catch, or an ICBM without a dual-key
control.
FWIW, it's not just X programs that do this. TeraTerm (a 'doze
terminal emulator) has this same behaviour, and it has wasted lots of
my time and energy in having to repeatedly go back to the original
window and re-copy the original text.
And don't tell me that I'm only ever allowed to select windows by
clicking on the menu bar and that I get what I deserve if I click in
the main part of the window. If you have lots of windows open, the
menu bars of many of them are often obscured. Why should 99% of the
window's surface area be verboten for selecting that window?
The entire model is screwy. It wastes lots of my time and interrupts
my workflow. The 'doze way works smoothly and is much closer to
fail-safe: it's very hard to accidentally press Ctrl+C and lose data
in the same way.
Learn it and enjoy the elegant simplicity of the scheme instead of
the insane mouse, keyboard, mouse, keyboard routine that
characterises the Windows way.
Real experts operate a computer with one hand on the mouse and one on
the keyboard *at the same time* anyway. This makes it very easy to do
selecting, cutting and pasting. And under 'doze, you can also use a
right-click over the selected area to bring up a menu with cut, copy
and paste options. You don't *have* to use the keyboard if you don't
find it more efficient.
Good points.
--
A closed mouth gathers no feet.
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