At Mon, 1 Mar 2010 13:53:19 +0000, Chris G wrote:
On Mon, Mar 01, 2010 at 01:16:42PM +0000, Steve Fosdick wrote:
On Sun, 28 Feb 2010 12:06:44 +0000 Chris G cl@isbd.net wrote:
I am *forever* getting text inserted at the wrong place because it's inserted at the mouse cursor rather than the text cursor. This happens particularly in web textareas but the problem is common to most/all GUI applications I think. (I just tried in OpenOffice and it's the same there).
Surely by default one would expect text to be inserted at the *text* cursor, not where you've moved the mouse cursor to which is often out of the way to avoid it obscuring what you're typing.
My editor (xvile) manages to do it right, it's a GUI application but text inserts where I'm typing.
Is there a setting somewhere to say "insert text at the text cursor"?
Chris,
Which GUI environment are you having the problem with, i.e. GNOME, KDE Xfce etc?
My experience using GNOME is that for most applications that have some kind of text entry widget, clicking in that text entry not only focuses that widget but sets the text insertion point to where the mouse click happens.
That's a *left* button click. To paste text you use the middle button and that *doesn't* move the cursor.
For many applications, for example editors, the major part of the main window is a form of text entry so here I would typically find that if I click in the application's main window to raise that window to the top it has the side effect of changing the text insertion point. The solution I have always used for this to to click on the title bar to raise an application instead.
This isn't the issue.
Let me try and describe it again. I'm talking about the 'classic' Unix copy/paste with the mouse where you copy text by dragging with the left button (button 1) pressed or, maybe, by multi-clicking the left button. You then paste that text by pressing the 'middle' button, that's button 3.
If you do this in a text window (Gnome Terminal, or an xterm) the text is always pasted at the text cursor position (usually the prompt) regardless of where you have left the mouse cursor. Thus you can go back to a previous command or the result of an ls, copy something and then paste it at the prompt without having to carefully reposition the *mouse* cursor back at the prompt. It also works this way in my (GUI) editor, xvile.
I think a key difference here is that you're (rather, one is) not X pasting the text into an xterm. When you 'paste' into an xterm, the text actually gets typed into that xterm. (You can sometimes see this if you paste a large wodge of text, it takes a visible amount of time and inserts the text sequentially.)
As you say, this is simply not the way that other GUI text frames behave.