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Comment by globular-toast | Hacker News Reader

Not enough people know that you can just select text then middle click somewhere to paste it. No keys required and yes it works with all terminal emulators I've tried. This has been default behaviour on Linux desktops for as long as I've used it (decades).

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The problem with this (and to me it's a super annoying problem - marking and pasting with left and middle button is super fast and efficient) is that some browsers (or maybe it's the toolkits behind them) start to either ignore this functionality or force you to repeat the action before it works.

Yeah, I've noticed this with "some browsers" (ie. Chrome).

It's reason enough for me to stick with Firefox.

I'm almost exclusively using firefox and I encounter it on some websites and not others. In particular selection in code boxes is the thing that often doesn't work. So I suspect it's actually not the browsers but some websites playing weird js shenanigans.

Depends what you mean with "to select something"; for example if you click on the URL bar in Firefox then all the text is automatically selected. Should that count as the user "selecting" something? Perhaps not? None of this is very straight-forward.

If I do that in a Chrome-based browser, the text looks like it's selected, but it isn't. Same if I just mark the text using the left button. It won't paste when I click the middle button. I have to click again, then double click, and then it'll paste - most of the time.

Elsewhere I either double-click on a word, which will select that word for pasting, or I mark a section with the left button (press and hold at the beginning of the selection, move and release). And the middle button will paste. And paste again, if I wish.

But URLs in Chrome-based browsers instead behave in the annoying way described above. In the past it worked as expected.

The fact there is a totally different way to copy text in the terminal is the issue, it just breaks the common mental model. Even worse, this shortcut _requires using a mouse_, and not just for copying, also for selecting!

X has had two clipboards for longer than I've been using it, which is nearly three decades.

If your mental model of clipboard interaction only involves a single clipboard, and you use X, your mental model is simply wrong.

Sure, you could change X to match your mental model, but now you've broken the mental models of everyone who actually learned to use the software. And one more useful feature that makes X nice to use gets sacrificed to please the people who came from Windows but desperately want everything to work like Windows.

How would you be copy/pasting in a terminal emulator without a mouse?

Any time I've seen someone do it it's: mouse to select, keyboard to copy, mouse to select other place, keyboard to paste.

I cringe every time because it could be just: mouse to select, mouse to select and paste it in the other place with one click.

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