1070518 - Allow pasting X primary selection using the keyboard (Shift-Insert)

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(MailNews Core :: Composition, defect)

Description

[Daniel Hahler]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:32.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/32.0
Build ID: 20140830210550

Steps to reproduce:

While the X primary selection (what you have selected using the mouse somewhere) can be pasted using a middle mouse click, there is no way to paste it using the clipboard.

The usual shortcut for this is Shift-Insert, but this pastes the primary clipboard and therefore appears to be an alias for Ctrl-V.

I would expect Shift-Insert to behave as an alias on Windows etc (where there's no distinction between clipboard and selection), but as middle-clicking in Linux.

Comment 1

[Philip Chee]

Is this a new problem or has it always been like that?

Comment 2

[Nuno Silva [:njsg]]

Could this be caused by the same bug in GTK+, where shift+insert has been bound to paste from the CLIPBOARD selection?
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=643391

Philip, I don't know for sure for how long this has been around. I think it was not always like that, that some years ago Firefox worked much better with X's PRIMARY selection, but I may be mistaken.

Comment 3

[Tom Prince [:tomprince]]

Attachment: Proof of concept implementation

Here is a proof of concept patch to go along with the patch at 
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=643391

Comment 4

[kobaz]

Can this patch be incorporated into the next release please?

Thanks.

Comment 5

[me]

I would also like this patch to be merged; can confirm that at least 5+ years ago, Firefox worked well with X's PRIMARY selection, and SHIFT-INSERT did paste PRIMARY rather than CLIPBOARD.

Comment 6

[Raphaël Droz]

This should be assigned to the "Firefox" product.

Comment 7

[Kameron Larsen]

I'm not sure why the Product was changed to Thunderbird -> MailNews Core when this bug is clearly talking about Firefox. But I can confirm that it also affects Thunderbird.

Comment 8

[mozbugs]

I would like to see this bug's status changed to "CONFIRMED", since it's clear that X11 users are all struggling with the usability of the current handling of the primary selection. I'll note that both the ICCM and Freedesktop.Org human interface guidelines say that highlighted text is automatically the X11 primary selection. Firefox does not follow these guidelines, which I believe is the root cause of the current bug's usability issues.

Comment 9

[jsbronder]

This bug is definitely relevant to firefox and is blocking myself and may others I know from switching back to firefox. The product field was incorrectly changed 4 years ago. Should I just file a new bug and refer to this one?

Comment 10

[Dick]

why has this patch not been accepted!?

it is a serious UX inconsistency under X
(the likes of which would not be tolerated in macOS, for example)

it's also astounding that it has persisted for more than two decades: bug 228011

please fix it!