On 01 Mar 14:14, Chris G wrote:
On Mon, Mar 01, 2010 at 02:02:32PM +0000, Richard Lewis wrote:
At Mon, 1 Mar 2010 13:49:21 +0000, Tim Green wrote:
On 1 March 2010 13:34, Chris G cl@isbd.net wrote:
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.
I noticed middle click pasting moved the text cursor before dropping the text in years ago, so I use the keyboard instead.
That's another good point. I don't really use the mouse for anything.
How do you select text to copy then? I guess you can do it with the keyboard but if it's at the other end of a large editing window it gets a bit clumsy. The ability to be able to select bits of text at one place (with the mouse/mouse cursor) and paste them somewhere else (at the text cursor) is really, really useful at times. You can, for example select a collection of words one by one from a line and paste them back somewhere else in a different order without to much hand/mouse movement.
A typical case (which does work as it's in a terminal window) is that I'll do an 'ls' to list some files and then want to perform some action on a selection of them. So, it's :-
chris$ ls chris$ ls CHA17 MR GREEN 2.jpg email contact details.doc python CHA17 MR GREEN 3.jpg fred results-survey86534.csv CHA17 MR GREEN.jpg gradwell results-survey86534.doc Chris Test Project.pod isbd results-survey86534.gnumeric Christmas.mdb jrml results-survey86534.uos Desktop limesurvey.sql rhinotes.txt Mail mmboat src Marmalade Jan 2010.glabels moin temp News new.html tmp bin office10.iso view.html correspondence pictures vvexport_86534.csv details.txt postponed www diagrams pyboat xxx.rtf chris$ rm new.html view.html vvexport_86534.csv xxx.rtf chris$Copying and pasting those filenames is dead easy, move mouse cursor over the filename, double-click to select the name, hit middle button and it's pasted at the prompt (text cursor), hit space bar (with the other hand), select next file ..... No major mouse movement, no major hand movement as one hand stays on the mouse the other hand hits the space bar.
If, as happens in textareas and GUI apps, the text cursor moves you can't easily use the mouse to select things and put them all in one place without lots of mouse movement.
Right - 2 things here...
1) Copy pasting filenames is never a good idea, and if you're really going to do that at least use ls -1 so that you only get 1 long list of filenames. Otherwise, use find and xargs for multiple files, with the -print0 option to find and the -0 option to xargs.
2) Copy paste is not just an X11 thing, there's a seperate setup for using copy paste in screen, which works really really quite nicely. (Also, vim, for copying between files has the y operator, etc).