103808 - Need a keyboard method of pasting X selection in URL bar

Status: NEW

(Core :: DOM: Editor, enhancement)

Description

[Danek Duvall]

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i586; en-US; rv:0.9.4+) Gecko/20011007
BuildID:    20011007

I try to use the mouse as little as possible, but while I can use shift-insert
in many other applications (including Netscape) to paste the X selection, I
can't here, although middle-mouse works fine.  The other obvious choice, ctrl-v,
also doesn't work.

This also applies to the open web location dialog, at the very least.

Comment 1

[Jo Hermans]

first ctrl-L, then ctrl-V ?

Comment 2

[Danek Duvall]

Nope, the ctrl-v just doesn't seem to want to paste the X selection at all.

Comment 3

[Jesse Ruderman]

rkaa and I discussed this last night on #mozillazine, but we didn't agree on 
anything, except that the things she loves most about unix are some of the 
things I hate most about it.  Confirming based on rkaa's expressed annoyance.

Related bugs (these are all *mouse*-centric solutions specific to the URL bar):
bug 76010 middle-mouse paste adds to selection instead of overwriting
 (fixing this would let you left-click and then middle-click, or just middle-
 click in the location bar, to replace the location bar's contents with the 
 clipboard contents)
bug 24651 [rfe] button to clear the URL field
bug 88093 Add a "Clear" button to the Linux "Open Web Location..." dialog

Does this bug need to be specific to the URL bar?  I think it's a major 
shortcoming of X's selection that you can't paste it using the keyboard.  (I 
think transient selections aren't a good idea to begin with for other reasons, 
but that's another flamewar.)

By the way, until there's an easy way to paste the X selection into the 
location bar, we can't use middle-click in the content for panning by default 
on Linux (bug 63712, I think).

Comment 4

[Aaron Leventhal]

-> akkana( UNIX keyboard bug)

Comment 5

[Akkana Peck]

It's actually part an editor bug, and part a clipboard bug.

Here's the deal: the editor's paste command currently only pastes the CLIPBOARD
selection, whereas I assume you're talking about the PRIMARY selection, the one
that gets autocopied when you select something with the mouse, and which gets
pasted when you click the middle mouse button.

So I thought, "No sweat -- I'll just add code in the editor to paste the PRIMARY
if the CLIPBOARD paste fails."

Sounded easy -- but it turns out that when we try to paste the clipboard
selection, it returns NS_OK even if there was nothing there.  And I bet we have
a lot of code that depends on that behavior.  I can change the various editor
Paste methods to return errors if nothing was pasted, and then always return
NS_OK from the paste command, but I'll have to watch out for mouse paste and
possibly drag-and-drop and other methods that might rely on some of the same
routines, and it's possible that this may turn out to require a change at the
nsClipboard level (cc'ing Pavlov just in case he knows offhand).  But I'll take
it for now.

Comment 6

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

Bugs targeted at mozilla1.0 without the mozilla1.0 keyword moved to mozilla1.0.1 
(you can query for this string to delete spam or retrieve the list of bugs I've 
moved)

Comment 7

[Jesse Ruderman]

Wait a minute, is this really an accessibility problem?  I don't think it's 
possible to create a primary X selection without using the mouse, and there's 
no reason for Mozilla to change that.

Comment 8

[Akkana Peck]

On Unix any selection made in mozilla gets autocopied to PRIMARY, even
selections made via keyboard (e.g. shift-rightarrow).  So it is possible. 
Whether keyboard-only users actually do this is another question.

Pushing out and marking helpwanted -- too many bugs on my plate for this
milestone.  If anyone is really hurting needing this, let me know and I'll
schedule some time to look at it.

Comment 9

[Tim Small]

Well, this is an oldy, but is my main keyboard nav annoyance for mozilla/firefox etc.

Konqueror (and kde/QT in general) pastes the PRIMARY on Ctrl-Shift-Insert.  Maybe mozilla should adopt that as well?

Comment 10

[Michal 'hramrach' Suchanek]

Due to this bug it is virtually impossible to paste long URLs that appear wrapped in another application into Firefox. As the URL has to be pasted in parts and the first part fills the location bar there is nowhere to paste the second part.

Comment 11

[Daniel Hahler]

This appears to work in the meantime in Firefox (32.0):
I can middle-paste into the URL bar and a textarea.

Also Shift-Insert works as expected (pasting the primary selection), but this (Shift-Insert) does not work in Thunderbird: it pastes the primary clipboard.

Comment 12

[Akkana Peck]

Removing myself as assignee for editor bugs, since the editor project is (sadly) long gone.