Mail Archives: cygwin/2005/02/08/14:44:49
Dave Korn wrote:
>> The selection model used by rxvt is standard throughout the X11 world.
>
> It's insane.
And it's not necessarily standard either. For example, Konsole on SuSE
does not auto select.
> Unless you have the precision muscular control skills of a world-class
> gymnast, a mouse always moves at least a little bit when you press
> down on the button.
>
> This makes it very tricky to select a new window without
> unintentionally erasing the contents of the clipboard that you were
> hoping to paste there because the mouse moved just enough as you
> clicked it to select a single character and the auto-copy destroyed
> your clipboard contents without asking.
It's not quite as bad as that really. Slight movements do not alway
register a selection. It is hit and miss sometimes...
> Destroying user data without any kind of confirmation, are-you-sure,
> or requiring a difficult-to-type-accidentally key-combination (such as
> ctrl-c) is an appallingly incompetent piece of UI design. It's like
> having a pistol without a safety catch, or an ICBM without a dual-key
> control.
>
> FWIW, it's not just X programs that do this. TeraTerm (a 'doze
> terminal emulator) has this same behaviour, and it has wasted lots of
> my time and energy in having to repeatedly go back to the original
> window and re-copy the original text.
>
> And don't tell me that I'm only ever allowed to select windows by
> clicking on the menu bar and that I get what I deserve if I click in
> the main part of the window. If you have lots of windows open, the
> menu bars of many of them are often obscured. Why should 99% of the
> window's surface area be verboten for selecting that window?
>
> The entire model is screwy. It wastes lots of my time and interrupts
> my workflow. The 'doze way works smoothly and is much closer to
> fail-safe: it's very hard to accidentally press Ctrl+C and lose data
> in the same way.
>
>> Learn it and enjoy the elegant simplicity of the scheme instead of
>> the insane mouse, keyboard, mouse, keyboard routine that
>> characterises the Windows way.
>
> Real experts operate a computer with one hand on the mouse and one on
> the keyboard *at the same time* anyway. This makes it very easy to do
> selecting, cutting and pasting. And under 'doze, you can also use a
> right-click over the selected area to bring up a menu with cut, copy
> and paste options. You don't *have* to use the keyboard if you don't
> find it more efficient.
Good points.
--
A closed mouth gathers no feet.
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