Terminator

Gnome, Terminator v0.98: clicking to focus on window selects and copies

Asked by aaaa

Hello Guys and/or Girls,

Thanks for Terminator.

Now I am running Fedora 24 and Gnome 2.32 and Terminator v0.98 (the latest available through my package manager)

I have focus-follows-mouse set.

Here is the situation:

Whenever a Terminator window is partially hidden by another window I do a 'left click' inside the Terminator's window in order to raise it and "unhide" it.

Many times this results in selecting (as in mouse select for copy into the clipboard) either a single character where my click was or even the whole line. And this is very irritating because it spoils whatever was in my clipboard and I was preparing to paste into that terminal's window.

I have noticed that this does not happen with other applications, e.g. Firefox or Thunderbird. They are a bit more "tolerant" with that first click into their window, selecting and copying to clipboard takes a little more persistence in clicking. Actually usually selecting a whole line works by DOUBLE-clicking and selecting anything else by clicking and dragging.

So, is this something that "bothers" other users too? Is it intended this way or is it just a glitch which can be fixed?

As far as I am concerned, there is no reason why to be so "trigger-happy" with filling (and REPLACING previous content!) the clipboard whenever someone just clicks-to-raise or whatever. And yes I love the way the clipboard works and would not consider changing anything about how the clipboard is filled (i.e. with left-click and drag, in distinction to M$ style of ctrl-c etc.)

Many Thanks again,

Andreas Hadjiprocopis

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aaaa
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Revision history for this message
Stephen Boddy (stephen-j-boddy) said : 		#1

I'm pretty sure this has cropped up before. This is something determined by the underlying VTE widget. The VTE widget used by 0.98 is very old, and was a bit too sensitive to mouse clicks where there was some movement. A couple of pixels when clicking and you selected something. The GTK3 branch is a much newer VTE which has slightly different rules on selections. There you have to move a significant distance to begin a selection. This makes it much harder to accidentally select.

Revision history for this message
aaaa (aaa123123) said : 		#2

Hi,
thanks for your reply.

I have just got the terminator-GTK3 branch and will try it for a while.
I will see what will happen. Just to be clear: I do not need to upgrade
anything else? just bzr the GTK3 branch and install right?

unfortunately i use Docky and can't seem to be able to dock it there.
there is no icon to pin it. oh well.

Is there a way to install it by changing its name so it does not
overwrite my 0.98 terminator?
I managed to install the scripts with different name but there must be
some libraries as well.

Many Thanks

On 06/12/16 23:27, Stephen Boddy wrote:
> Your question #406511 on Terminator changed:
> https://answers.launchpad.net/terminator/+question/406511
>
> Status: Open => Answered
>
> Stephen Boddy proposed the following answer:
> I'm pretty sure this has cropped up before. This is something determined
> by the underlying VTE widget. The VTE widget used by 0.98 is very old,
> and was a bit too sensitive to mouse clicks where there was some
> movement. A couple of pixels when clicking and you selected something.
> The GTK3 branch is a much newer VTE which has slightly different rules
> on selections. There you have to move a significant distance to begin a
> selection. This makes it much harder to accidentally select.
>

Revision history for this message
Stephen Boddy (stephen-j-boddy) said : 		#3

If you have 0.98 installed you can run a bzr branch locally from within the branch directory. You might need to install some dependencies as you're not using a package manager. I don't think it is possible to install them both at the same time to the main system though. The problem is, even if you copy the top level scripts, that they will look in /usr/share/terminator/terminatorlib for the meat of the application. In your case that would be 0.98 and that would break badly if the gtk3 master script tried to run using the gtk2 terminatorlib.

Revision history for this message
aaaa (aaa123123) said : 		#4

Thanks Stephen!