You must be joking [LWN.net]

You must be joking

Posted Nov 8, 2010 2:46 UTC (Mon) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861)
In reply to: You must be joking by drag
Parent article: LPC: Life after X

Yes but the answer to the browser bar problem is NOT to destroy the incredibly useful cut/paste behavior of traditional X. Rather, it's simply to have a button on the browser bar that will clear the @#$%& text when you press it, without requiring you to select the text first. How hard is that? I can't believe it's 2010 and we still don't have that as a default part of the browser.

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You must be joking

Posted Nov 8, 2010 3:39 UTC (Mon) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (2 responses)

my work-around is to just open a new tab to paste the URL into (and a history of doing this is why I have a couple hundred tabs open :-)

You must be joking

Posted Nov 8, 2010 7:07 UTC (Mon) by mp (subscriber, #5615) [Link] (1 responses)

In Firefox middle-clicking anywhere in the window opens the URL from the selection, no need to open new tabs and aim at the tiny address bar.

You must be joking

Posted Nov 8, 2010 7:14 UTC (Mon) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

that's a configurable option. I don't remember when I first ran into it, but I hunted down how to disable it and have happily used the middle mouse button to open a link in a new tab instead (I got _so_ annoyed at slightly missing a link or text bar and the entire page disappearing on my when firefos opened some random URL that it thought I wanted to go to, or a search for the text that happened to be in the clipboard)

You must be joking

Posted Nov 8, 2010 3:54 UTC (Mon) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841) [Link] (1 responses)

a button on the browser bar that will clear the @#$% text when you press it
Konqueror has this, and I love it. That, the built-in site filtering, and the filebrowser are enough to keep me using konqueror rather than firefox.

You must be joking

Posted Nov 8, 2010 15:53 UTC (Mon) by jackb (guest, #41909) [Link]

There is a Firefox addon called Clear Fields that adds the functionality you are looking for.

You must be joking

Posted Nov 8, 2010 8:56 UTC (Mon) by nicooo (guest, #69134) [Link]

I works fine with opera. X can't be blamed for people designing broken programs.

You must be joking

Posted Nov 9, 2010 5:20 UTC (Tue) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link] (2 responses)

AFAICT Firefox has an interesting tweak to this -- Control-L selects the text in the URL bar, *without* claiming the PRIMARY selection (which selecting the same text with the mouse would do). So to paste the PRIMARY selection into the current tab's URL bar, one can use the sequence: Control-L, backspace, middle-click.

You must be joking

Posted Nov 14, 2010 4:57 UTC (Sun) by tnoo (subscriber, #20427) [Link] (1 responses)

... which is exactly why I hate using FF. Konqueror has a "delete" button to rub out the old URL.

You must be joking

Posted Nov 14, 2010 6:10 UTC (Sun) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

In FF just middle-click the favicon to the left of the URL. Instead of taking 2 clicks, it takes a single click.

Seems a rather weak reason to hate a browser.

You must be joking

Posted Nov 15, 2010 16:24 UTC (Mon) by wookey (guest, #5501) [Link]

ctrl-U used to provide this vital feature and then some eejit decided that that in a browser that should open a window with the page source in it. That was _such_ a painful decision and still enrages me on a daily basis on machines where I haven't persuaded the system to change the keybinding. (where did it come from?).

Ctrl-U can still be made to work (as 'clear line/box'), but it gets harder to find the rune every year. A button to prod for the same function would indeed be a useful alternative.

Like many here I find middle-button paste to be one of the finest things about GNU/Linux, and it's extremely tiresome when you get apps that don't do it right. I really hope it does not get sacrificed as part of the GUI re-architecting that it looks like we are headed for.

I use remote-X-over-ssh for graphical apps fairly regularly and it's extremely useful, but accept the argument that we can achieve much the same effect by other means (SPICE/VNC/NX/whatever). I hope that does indeed come to pass.

A similar button does exist.

Posted Nov 18, 2010 3:52 UTC (Thu) by gmatht (subscriber, #58961) [Link]

In Google-Chrome middle-click the (+) new tab button to open a new window with that URL, this also works for searches.

With Firefox, middle-click the icon to the left of the icon bar. However this does not work for searching for non-urls; see the patch to implement middle-clicking on the search icon at: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=414849. I would be particularly interested to know if you would find the functionality implemented by this patch useful.