Copy/paste with keyboard shortcut follows selection instead of pasting in current directory

[Dario Ruellan]

Background: when you paste a file or folder and you have a folder selected, the "paste" take place inside the selected folder.

This seems to be the default behavior on my installation (0.1.6), and I found it counterintuitive and annoying at best, since I usually want to paste things on the folder I'm on, and I must make sure I unselect any previously selected subfolder (something you can't do using the keyboard without some kind of work-around).

When the paste action take place, there is no visual or audible indication. If you are not aware of this feature and you have a folder selected just by chance, the first impression is that the "paste" action did not work.

It is also not consistent, since it does not work with files. This seems obvious with plain files, like text documents, but also it does not work with packages, that have a folder structure. Also, AFAIK this is not something you usually find on other file managers (Nautilus, Dolphin, Explorer, for naming a few), so, it is a quite unique feature.

So, What do you guys think? Are there valid reasons to implement this behave as default?

[Jeremy Wootten (jeremywootten)]

Are you referring to paste using the context menu or using the keyboard (Ctrl-V)? The current trunk version deselects everything when the background is is clicked on so this issue should not occur when using the context menu. Using Ctrl-V pastes into a single selected folder but if there are more than one selected then it pastes into the current folder, which seems reasonable behaviour.

[Dario Ruellan (druellan)]

Hi Jeremy. You're right, I'm talking mainly about keyboard shortcuts, but I wanted to review the whole mechanism.

Using the mouse, you have and indicator on the context menu "paste / paste into" (still subtle at the point I did not noticed it the first time, but its there), but using the keyboard you have nothing to pre-discover this behaviour, and nothing to post-discover it. You have no feedback.

Unless you're pasting a very big chunk of files (the progress indicator pops-up), the "paste-into" action take place silently and hides the data from the user. The copy/paste mechanism was never reliable (on a multitasking environment, the clipboard gets easily overridden), and you must go inside the subfolder to acknowledge the action. The user can easily assume something is wrong and the action did not take place. That can leave sensitive information on inconvenient places, like the public folder on Dropbox, or cut the data from the original folder, and hide them somewhere on the user navigation history.

So, my point: using the keyboard the action is not discoverable, but suing the mouse is also not evident enought to be a reliable method to deal with user's data.

The obvious solution could be to add some visual feedback, say, an animation on the target folder. That work is you have eyesight. If not, the screen reader supposedly told you that action is named "paste into folder" and not "paste", assuming you are using the context menu.
Also, a "turn off" switch could be welcome. I use several OSs and it is difficult to not intuitively paste things without noticing the selected folder.

What do you think?

[Dario Ruellan (druellan)]

Just to document the case, I've got problems again tonight using the keyboard:

I ctrl+v a chunk of files in a folder full of subfolders. I did not noticed the first subfolder selected, since it were "scrolled-up" at the time. I realized that something was wrong because the overwrite dialog popped-up and I was not expecting it, but if I WAS, I'm pretty sure I would have granted permission, messing things up.

I was hopping to keep the feature and improve the behaviour for both mouse and keyboard use, but now I'm pretty sure I want it disabled for keyboard use. It is just too dangerous.

[Jeremy Wootten (jeremywootten)]

So, the safe option would be for Ctrl-V to paste into the currently displayed folder, even if a folder in it is selected? Other file managers seem to take this approach.

[Dario Ruellan (druellan)]

Hi Jeremy. Sorry I missed your previous message, and yes, disabling this for keyboard is the best solution. If anyone missed this function, a special shortcut could be implemented.
@Daniel: thanks for the fix!