Copy and Paste

I don’t get it. Of your bullets, the first is opinion, so fair enough, but the others seem odd: isn’t the raising click a non-selecting click on most desktops (are KDE and Gnome really that broken?); I can select text in a link on that page easily in a Firefox-based browser; vim’s problems are vim’s problems, not X’s; and Shift and Insert are at most 10cm apart on my keyboards, even if I’ve no idea what that shortcut does.

^C for copy is understandable, but V as paste and X as cut? In what language does paste begin with a V? The Emacsy scissors-like K and the paste-knife-like Y are more pictorial and language-independent, but broken in many Firefox installations today.

I don’t have this problem… Normal (or complex) copy and paste always works fine for me with Ctrl+C/V with all “modern” apps. I can copy the text from http://dabase.com/ to gedit without problem…
I also love the functionallity of quick copy and paste by just selecting and middle-clicking. This is of course only for immediate copy and paste, and it doesn’t overwrite the real clipboard managed with Ctrl+C/V (except in gnome-terminal it seems) so I don’t see any downside here. Even in emacs, I can paste from the clipboard using “paste” from the menu…
If some old school programs don’t support Ctrl+C/V and don’t replace the shortcuts with others or some kind of menu, well sure you have to use the select – middle click copy and paste, but it’s not representative of the state of Xorg, IMHO.

Of course, you should :set paste before pasting into Vim. I’m sure you know this, but in case someone doesn’t…

There are two shifts on a typical keyboard.

And no, there isn’t any correspondence between ’’ and ‘copy’, ‘cut’, ‘paste’.

Damn Emacs users !

CTRL+C/X/V are paradigms that Windows users know and they are pretty much the defacto standard.

When I try copy text from a link in firefox, Firefox seems to think that I want to drag the link.

Gnome use SHIFT+CTRL+V and KDE Shift+Insert. Oh dear!

Seo: Don’t forget to go into Insert mode or the clipboard can drive vim to just about anything whilst pasting…

Yes it’s true why selecting and copying are mixed together? These are two different things, and sometimes text is selected without wanting to copy it.
As for Shift-Insert, use the right shift key and you can use only one hand.

Otoo: I’m a left-hander when it comes to copying and pasting =)

Highlight then middle click is rapid fire copy and paste, and generally a power-user trick. C-x C-c and C-v are de facto standards (thanks to Windows and large amounts of Unix software using them): all of GNOME and KDE I believe uses the the C-xcv shortcuts.

The only problem is that Firefox breaks middle-click paste…

A power trick with the mouse? On you on crack? No power user uses the mouse.

Have a look at the Edit menus in either KDE or Gnome…

Thank heavens Firefox doesn’t do middle click paste!

For someone new to Debian and X, all you should teach them is ctrl-x,c,v. On any modern desktop it work as expected. Don’t tell them about the selecting and middle-clicking as that will just confuse them and is a legacy/power user feature.

gnome-terminal uses shift-control-v because ctrl-v can used in command-line applications. I’m guessing reason x/c/v (and z for undo) were chosen (by Apple?) is because they’re all in the lower left corner and can be easily hit by the left hand holding ctrl (or command).

THe Shit+Insert thin isn’t a unix thing. It’s a CUA thing and was invented by IBM. thr C-{x,c,v} thingamagings were invented by Microsoft and later adapted by apple if my memory isn’t broken.

And mouse cutting and pasting is the bomb, yo. I’me exteremely annoyed when I’m in front of a windows box and can’t do that.

You don’t mention the difference between primary and secondary clip buffers at all in your post.. nor what I think is the biggest problem with X clipboards, is that the source program owns the selection until you paste: so you lose the clipboard if the source program crashes.

I learned the Shift-Insert thing about 15 years ago on Windows. There was no talk of Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V etc back then. In fact, I believe they were copied from Macintosh, where some other key was used instead of Control.

Select-and-middle-click is my primary method of copypasting when not in Emacs. Yes, it does work in Firefox. I hate it when some apps handle it poorly (like Openoffice Impress).

Real Men have keyboards with dedicated buttons for these things. Only weenies waste their middle buttons on pasting.

As for the “raising click”: even MacOS is agnostic here. Most every desktop I’ve used gets this wrong, and there’s likely some weenie in the GNOME command chain who objects to fixing this there.

- Chris

I know others have alluded to this, but:

PRIMARY != CLIPBOARD

yes, having the first client hold the selection until the second client asks was an incredibly stupid design decision even back when we were worried about the bandwidth and memory on our X servers, but this has nothing whatsoever to do with anything’s UI.

Use gnome-clipboard-daemon, if you’re a C-x/C-c/C-v person, or xcb, if you’re like me and will give up your PRIMARY when they pull it from your cold, dead hands.

There’s nothing I hate more than coming across a Firefox where url-yanking has been disabled (this feature dates from Netscape 1.x, fer chrissakes), or being limited to only the clipboard on a Windows box.

Actually, no. What I really hate are GNOME apps than assume everyone only uses CLIPBOARD and therefore it’s okay to mess with PRIMARY. An app can still “select” stuff without doing this; if it won’t, it’s broken.

Ctrl-{x,c,v} is just bullshit. Ctrl-c should always be the interrupt signal. The other two are just nonsens, as MJ Ray already pointed out.
The most common and long lasting standard is Ctrl-Insert for ‘Copy’, Shift-Insert for ‘Paste’ and Shift-Delete for ‘Cut’.
Please don’t adopt the brain-farts of Micro$oft.

Shhheeessshhh! The geek crowd doesn’t get it? Ctrl-{x,c,v} is the standard. We are living with the Microsoft legacy. Bite it.

I don’t use Gnome, but collegues use KDE and the klipboard-clipboard-daemon was one of the most annoying aspects I found with KDE. I’ll look again at it and probably weep.

You want to live with Microsoft’s legacy, go use Windows. Stop trying to break the rest of the world to match.

Non-geeks on Windows that I’ve seen tend to use the right-click menu for cut/copy/paste more than the nonsensical key combos anyway.

IIRC gnome-clipboard-daemon is not an adequate solution to the clipboard issue. It doesn’t satisfy past content-negotiation so if you’re copying anything but plain text…

http://www.hezmatt.org/~mpalmer/blog/general/a_rebuttal_to_copy_and_paste.html

God invented "focus to pointer" to solve this exact problem. Clicking to focus is such a pain.

Neither Gnome or KDE does that by default.

Firefox is far ahead of any other browser you probably use. There is no avoiding it.

Clicking the middle mouse button aka “scroll wheel” does have problems. I’ve seen very odd things happen when pasting into Firefox and the pages flash back 2 pages.

“The most common and long lasting standard is Ctrl-Insert for ‘Copy’, Shift-Insert for ‘Paste’ and Shift-Delete for ‘Cut’.”

Unfortunately, if you’re selecting text with your mouse in the right hand, and using the keyboard with your left hand to perform the cut/copy/paste actions, ctrl-insert and the like are probably the worst possible shortcut possible (you either have to move your left hand to the right side of the keyboard and contort it or take your right hand off the mouse and use that). The beauty of Ctrl+x,c,v is that your left hand doesn’t have to move at all.

Of course since I’m using a dvorak keyboard, my shortcuts of choice are Ctrl+q,j,k…

Vi-> use :set paste

Middle mouse button paste is brilliant, whenever I return to systems without it, I am loathed to use such awkward cut and paste key sequences. “Clicking left and right together” indicated you bought the wrong hardware for running GNU/Linux, fortunately mice are cheap.

The “defacto” standards aren’t necessarily right—do you want “compose+a+`” for a-acute, or would you prefer to type in the hex code as every MS Windows user has committed them to memory. Think of the kids who don’t have to learn these broken habit.

Highlighting text with the mouse should be enough to indicate to the system you want to do something with it. Copy to a buffer is a reasonably default action. Any interface that ignores your highlight till you explicitly tell it to do something is just being plain unhelpful.

Sure the X default behaviour is a tad naff, but apps like Klipper can match with regex, and perform appropriate action (highlight URL get offered a choice(!) of installed browsers), whilst retaining a history in case you highlighted something else later and wanted the earlier one. An ordinary users can use Klipper without knowing about regex, as it isn’t “in your face power”, just “in your face ease of use and functionality”, even mediocre users like me could add “validate URL” without understanding how the “regex” matched the URL, just by adding an action.

My main complaint with GNOME is it doesn’t do this the KDE way (who mentioned lack of graphical menu editors). Klipper and KDE are just so right in doing it this way, and I can only conclude the rest of you haven’t used a correctly configured KDE desktop. KDE with Klipper had this right in version 1.mumble if I remember rightly, certainly worked grand in version 2, that and spell checking text boxes everywhere, are the functions I loved in KDE and miss since trying to master GNOME.

Middle mouse button paste works fine in Firefox—no idea what Kai is wittering on about there—what did I miss? The only thing that breaks this is that damned Technocrat.net rich text editor AFAIK.

Just saw this in my blogroll this morning:

http://berserk.org/2006/04/04/copy-or-cut-and-paste-firefox-bug/

Many mice have the middle mouse button implemented as the scroll wheel. Anyone who doesn’t have nimble figures can trigger not only a middle mouse event, but a couple of scroll events too! This can lead to all sorts of unwanted behaviour. Especially in firefox.

So I copy a URL and I get a popup from Klipper asking what UA I want to launch? How daft. I use one browser, I don’t like popups and I want my clipboard to work.

I didn’t complain about ‘middle mouse click in Firefox’. I think some other people mentioned there was something wrong it. My complaint for Firefox is copying text inside A HREF links. I get this strange drag icon that disrupts my navigation.

shift+insert, ctrl+insert and shift+delete are CUA standards that were proposed by IBM long time ago. They are the standards.

CTRL+X,CTRL+C and CTRL+V are Machintosh and have been introduced by Microsoft since their divorce with IBM.

CUA standards are faster when your using the keyboard and typing a lot.
Microsoft standards are faster when your using the mouse and not typing a lot.

If you don’t know CUA standards that’s because you started informatics with VB and have not been a lot to school.

[...] Also, I just discovered http://natalian.org/archives/2006/04/02/copy-and-paste/ , http://berserk.org/2006/04/04/copy-or-cut-and-paste-firefox-bug/ , and — an entire Slashdot article about copy-paste!. Must read it sometime, although most of it will be crap. [...]

[...] There are some other discussions at http://natalian.org/archives/2006/04/02/copy-and-paste/ , http://berserk.org/2006/04/04/copy-or-cut-and-paste-firefox-bug/ , and this Slashdot article about copy-paste, although none of it has been useful. [...]

Hi dude,

Very valid points lol.
I’m using X Window etc. at work everyday and I’m big Linux fan, but there is no point negating everything from other camp, especially if it is good. Ctrl+{c,v,x} is comfortable, everyone knows that and fact is it works much better in MS Windows then in X Window no matter what environment you will put on top of that.