On Mon, Mar 01, 2010 at 02:22:54PM +0000, Chris G wrote:
On Mon, Mar 01, 2010 at 02:00:54PM +0000, Richard Lewis wrote:
It's definitely *not* that, I'm using a 4 button trackball with a dedicated 'middle' button which is the paste button.
[snip ways of preventing accidental button pushes]
My problem is that applications are *designed* to paste text at the *mouse cursor* position and I want to paste text at the *text cursor* position. I don't think you have quite understood what my original rant was about.
Ah, I see. Yes, I misunderstood. I think there were two cognitive blockages, one very dull and the other quite interesting.
The dull one was that the brushing-the-touchpad problem immediately came to mind as I read your initial post, so I read the rest of the thread with that firmly at the front of my thinking.
The more interesting one was that I couldn't conceive of the idea of deliberately clicking in a text frame and *not* expecting the text cursor to be re-positioned to the click site. This is almost quite distressing. I used to use Emacs in an xterm as a matter of habbit which, of course, paid no attention to mouse clicks. I now use GTK Emacs which does move the cursor when clicked on, *but* I rarely ever click on my Emacs (I just Alt+TAB to it). As a result, it seems I now assume that the point of clicking in a text frame is to move the cursor, and I couldn't see beyond this narrow-minded conception. :-(
Your missing what a proper mouse-aware GUI editor can do then! :-)
Oops, horrible me, "you're".
The one I use is actually an EMACS engine underneath, its ancestor is an incarnation of microEmacs. Xvile is mouse aware in that left button clicks move the cursor and select text but middle button clicks still paste at the text cursor insertion point.
By the way an application that runs in an xterm *can* be mouse aware, though I only know of one that is, the tin newsreader. It's a normal text mode application that runs in an xterm (or gnome-terminal, or whatever) but you can select newsgroups or articles by clicking on them with the mouse. This can cause some slight oddities if you try and select text with the mouse but there are ways to turn the mouse awareness off temporarily when you want to select text.
-- Chris Green
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