GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 604227
When copying/pasting charts, need to select new chart after pasting
Last modified: 2009-12-31 05:01:22 UTC
When copying/pasting charts, the new chart needs to be selected after pasting, rather than leaving the old chart selected. Otherwise when you try to drag the new chart (which is usually under the old chart), the old chart moves. Additionally, in general, if a drag operation is started and the current selected object is under another one, the topmost object should be selected and dragged, not the object underneath (to keep drag/move semantics the same as virtually all other programs...).
We should note that if you paste for example in gedit then the original remains selected. So the GNumeric's behaviour therefore matches the semeantics in at least some other programs (even if I find that very annoying.) Moreover, the drag/move behaviour in Gnumeric currently is the same as in OpenOffice Calc. So which "virtually all other programs" are you referring to?
I just checked KSpread with respect to the drag/move behaviour and it also matches Gnumeric's behaviour. So in the spirit of "to keep drag/move semantics the same as virtually all other programs" we should retain our current behaviour.
Haha, touche' :-) When talking about physical sheet objects however, the comparison to a text editor is not great, because if you go Select -> Copy -> Paste with a text editor, the paste operation pastes right over the text that was just copied (because it is still selected), however in drawing programs the convention is that if you paste and you have something currently selected, it doesn't replace the selection with what's being pasted, it deselects the current selection, then pastes, then selects what was just pasted. Inkscape behaves this way, for example. Various drawing programs in the early 90s (!Draw for RISC OS, and the predecessor of Xara) experimented with text-like pasting (delete and replace current selection on paste of objects from clipboard to canvas), but all the ones I'm aware of that did that changed to Inkscape-like behavior in the end because it was counterintuitive enough to be annoying. Spreadsheets are an interesting case because you have text-like elements (cell contents) as well as an overlayed drawing canvas. Quite a weird hybrid thinking about it conceptually. I guess when I referred to "other programs" I was thinking about drawing programs. It's pretty standard in drawing programs to at a pick operation at the beginning of a drag, in case there's something on top of the currently-selected object (again, Inkscape does this), because you usually try to drag things you can see rather than things you can't see. From a practicality point of view, it's just hard to interact with charts in Gnumeric when copying/pasting, because they can take up so much of the visible canvas that it just seems weird that you'd be dragging something underneath when so much canvas area near the pointer is covered with a huge object that looks like it's under the mouse but doesn't move when dragged because something is selected behind it. Anyway I guess there are two issues here: 1) whether or not to select new objects when pasting 2) whether or not to change the selection to the topmost object under the pointer when starting a drag.
With respect to (2) we should behave like the otehr spreadsheet programs. So that is a WONTFIX. (1) has been fixed in the development version. This problem has been fixed in the development version. The fix will be available in the next major software release. Thank you for your bug report.