I was just reading this thread… https://sh.itjust.works/post/23476261

…and it got me thinking about something that I’ve wanted for a long time. Why is it that keyboards have not evolved to have dedicated copy/paste keys left of the main board? I’d love to see an additional column of keys left of Esc->Ctrl configurable as macros at least. I do a lot of copy/paste for work. The current shortcuts arent terrible or anything but they’re not exactly comfortable. I’d rather move my whole hand to the left for a macro key than contort to hit the current shortcut.

What do you think?

    • Geth@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      0·
      3 months ago

      Middle mouse click is so much more useful as the navigation tool that it is. Using it for something completely unrelated like pasting is degeneracy.

      Actually, any text manipulation assigned to the mouse is completely ignoring the functionality of the 2 normal input devices on a normal computer.

      • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
        0·
        3 months ago

        You’re missing the point, in Linux middle mouse button works for the navigation that you’re mentioning, and additionally it pastes the text you have selected (not the one you have copied, so realistically you can “copy/paste” two things at once). So you don’t lose anything, you just gain functionality.

        • Geth@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          1·
          3 months ago

          You lose the auto-scroll button, which I use all the time and it only makes sense to be on the scroll wheel. I dispise what Linux does to this button. 🤷

            • Geth@lemmy.dbzer0.com
              1·
              3 months ago

              You middle click in a web page and it gives you the scroll orb instead of pasting text in the selected text box? Last time I checked that was not default behaviour, but possible with configuration.

              • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
                0·
                3 months ago

                Yes, all you have to do is not click on a text input area. It’s not the default behavior anywhere because the feature is disabled by default on most browsers (even on Windows) but enabling the auto-scroll feature on the browser makes it work exactly as you would expect, i.e. middle-click on a text area inputs the text, and on the majority of the page it gives you the scroll orb.

                • Geth@lemmy.dbzer0.com
                  1·
                  3 months ago

                  Auto-scroll by middle click is not disabled by default in windows and never was. Not in browsers, not I’m PDF apps, not in file explorers, not in word processors. If this were a disabled by default feature no one would use it. It’s in linux that you have to muck about with configuration to get it back to normal, which is using a navigation button on your pointing device to work for navigation instead of text manipulation. You shouldn’t have to configure something to make it make sense.

                  • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
                    0·
                    3 months ago

                    Ok, I was wrong, for some reason browsers have a different default for that setting depending on OS, for example Firefox docs:

                    https://kb.mozillazine.org/About:config_entries

                    In any case this is not a Linux problem, for some reason Mozilla (and probably Google as well) decided to use a different default depending on OS, so if you want the other behavior you need to change it, it has nothing to do with Linux, tomorrow Mozilla could decide to invert this setting, and it wouldn’t be a Windows problem that the default is off.

                    Which is different from the middle-mouse paste which is a feature of X window manager, therefore one could make the argument that it is a Linux feature.