On Mon, Mar 01, 2010 at 04:46:26PM +0000, Steve Fosdick wrote:
On Mon, 1 Mar 2010 14:34:26 +0000 Chris G cl@isbd.net wrote:
On Mon, Mar 01, 2010 at 02:16:22PM +0000, Brett Parker wrote:
On 01 Mar 13:53, Chris G wrote:
I'm not really expecting a solution to this problem, I was just having a bit of a rant at what seems like poor UI design common to almost every GUI app (apart from terminal windows and, maybe, a few editors). Unless, of course, there is some generic user interface option that I don't know about.
Well, that's good, because it's down to the developers how to interpret mouse actions, and they all disagree with each other...
Now, what you might be interested in instead is that there's a keyboard shortcut for pasting the X11 clipboard, Shift-Ins, that should do what you expect.
Shift-Ins doesn't seem to do anything for me in a textarea I just tried.
Ah, it works in this terminal window though, since terminals work the way I like anyway it doesn't win me much!
There are actually two mechanisms in X which can be used to copy/paste text from one place to another.
The old-style X method is to use selections. Dragging the mouse over some text selects it and when you release the mouse button leaves it as the primary selection. Centre-click then pastes the primary selection into the destination application, usually at the mouse cursor as you have noted.
The other method is to use the clipboard and in many applications there are keyboard shortcuts bound to the cut/copy/paste operations, often Ctrl-X (cut) Ctrl-C (copy), Ctrl-V (paste) so it would often be possible to use these without needing to click in the destination application which in turn should mean the paste happens at the text insertion point.
Yes, the Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V cut/paste does paste at the text cursor but, as I said in one of my postings above it is much more messy to cut/paste this way in many (most?) situations. The 'old-style' (what's old about it?) method uses only the mouse and for that reason is better IMHO as you don't have to move from mouse to keyboard and back so much.