Copy and Paste

The main thing that makes the Unix Xorg platform so broken is copying and pasting.

I’ve seen this rear its ugly head as I’ve been teaching someone about the Debian platform. I like to teach how to search for answers and then copy in samples to try. That’s so hard to do on Debian with poor skills it’s not funny.

• The “middle click” for pasting or pressing left and right mouse buttons together is completely brain dead
• When clicking to focus on another window in windowing environments like KDE or Gnome, it is very easy to accidentally select text (or rather whitespace) and lose the important information in the clipboard
• Selecting text in a link in Firefox is broken. Try copy some text from an unordered list
• Pasting into vim? Now spend a couple of minutes cleaning up white space and reformatting without `:nopaste`
• The Shift+Insert shortcut! Who came up with that? You need TWO HANDS to do that.
• Close the window of what you copied and you'll loose your copied text! ARGHHHHHHHHH

I’ve seen it written somewhere that “Copying and Pasting” is the single most productive element of everyday computing.

The real Unix way of copying and pasting doesn’t use a mouse and it’s far too difficult for average users.

This makes me even more convinced that the Desktop should just be the Web browser (Firefox) where CTRL+C/V/X “sort of” works…