A middle mouse button paste in gedit does not move cursor to insertion point

[jasonq]

Binary package hint: gedit

Use the middle mouse button to paste highlight-selected text does not move the cursor (and the viewed text) to the chosen insertion point. This is dangerous when the selected text and the insertion point are far apart because the user is left unsure if the paste succeeded until scrolling to the insertion point (which can be difficult to refind in a long document or in source code).

I am using the gedit in Ubuntu 9.04. I believe this to be a fairly recent regression as I seem to recall it working just a few months ago as I expect. I have tried deleting the gedit config directory and the behavior persists. I turn on most of the plugins available by default but that doesn't seem to be the cause.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thanks for the bug report. This particular bug has already been reported, but feel free to report any other bugs you find.

[jasonq (jason-quinn)]

Which bug number does it duplicates?

Why would the importance be low? This is a major bug.

[Bigfoot77210 (bigfoot77210)]

I agree with Jason.
Just try to write your PhD report in Latex using gedit.
Each time you want to copy and past something with the mouse, you're lost. You have to scroll 300 lines to go back to your previous position.

What is the interest in going back to the original text of the copy and past action? What if you want to copy and paste at several positions in the text. Just look at the following example:

line 056: text to copy and paste
…
line 102: paste the text here
…
line 150: paste again here
line 151: paste again here
line 152: paste again here and continue writting your poetry…

Each time you paste, you go back to line 56… You must scroll the screen almost 5 times! It is just borring. I do not speak about the other bugs of this feature in gedit, such as buffer erased when you left click on the document (https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/34629). Combining all those bugs make this great feature almost useless in gedit as it is for OOo 3.

Why is this feature more easy to use in the terminal than in a text editor?

This feature should work in gedit like it works in other applications. That's what I think.

[jasonq (jason-quinn)]

changing back to new until at supposed duplicate is given.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

it would be constructive to rather look to open bugs than reopening a duplicate

[jasonq (jason-quinn)]

Sebastien, could you please quote the duplicate bug number as already asked? If it is a duplicate, it is difficult to find the dup from the search terms I am using.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

see bug #255638 for example

[jasonq (jason-quinn)]

Bug #255638 is somewhat different since that bug pastes to a "random location" and is not deterministic. This bug pastes to wherever the cursor was last positioned and is reproducible. Bug #234911 is closer to this one though and probably the dupe.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Reopening for now, somebody having the issue should take that upstream they will probably have better ideas and can tell if that's a choice or a bug

[Raimund Andersen (anderse-gmx)]

Just found the bug upstream:

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=575251
They think it's

Priority: Normal
Severity: minor

Seems to exist since 2.25 and was reported nearly a year ago (2009-03-13), but is still 'unconfirmed' !!
Im thinking about simply using another editor...

[Raimund Andersen (anderse-gmx)]

Ok, now here comes the workaround:

http://github.com/potyl/gedit-scrollpaste

Emmanuel Rodriguez aka 'potyl' wrote a 'plugin' which fixes the scrolling when pasting text with the mouse.
Unfortunately, it's placed in sourcecode only in a 'repository-style', which means there's no configure script.
As I'm not very familar with these auto* tools, it took me a day to make it compile, but for me it's worth the pain.

In short form: After archiv extraction, call in the top level dir:

intltoolize --force --copy,
intltool-prepare,
aclocal,
automake --add-missing,
autoheader,
autoconf,

Then I created a 'Makefile.in' on the top level dir:
--------------------
all:
 $(MAKE) -C "src" || break ;
--------------------

Now it should be possible to call the usual configure, make.
I prefered to copy the files manually instead of 'make install'.

I can confirm this thing works for me!

BTW: Potyl demands the use of gtksourceview-2.0 >= 2.8.1, so it's not applicable to Ubuntu jaunty and below.

[Oliver Joos (oliver-joos)]

Wanted to add bug watch, but saw that Raimund already did. I just had to enable it.

[Oliver Joos (oliver-joos)]

RESOLVED by a patch of Ignacio Casal Quinteiro!

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

the issue has been fixed in gtk