== A weird little Firefox glitch with cut and paste
[[Yesterday I wrote about Chrome's cut and paste
ChromeCutAndPasteAnnoyance]], so to be fair today is about my long
standing little irritation with Firefox's cut and paste. Firefox
doesn't have Chrome's problem; I can cut and paste from _xterm_ to
it without issues. It's going the other way that there's a little
issue under what I've now determined are some odd and very limited
circumstances.
The simplest way to discuss this is to show you the minimal HTML
to reproduce this issue. Here it is:
.pn prewrap on
word1
word2
If you put this in a .html file, point Firefox at the file, double
click on 'word2', and try to paste it somewhere, you will discover
that Firefox has put a space in front of it (at least on X). If you
take out the whitespace before 'word2' in the HTML source, the space
in the paste goes away. No matter how many spaces are before 'word2',
you only get one in the pasted version; however, if you put a real
hard tab before word2, you get a tab instead of a space.
(You can add additional '_ wordN_' lines, and they'll get spaces
before the wordN when pasted. Having only word2 is just the minimal
version.)
You might wonder how I noticed such a weird thing. The answer is
that this structure is present on [[Wandering Thoughts /blog]] entry
pages, such as [[the one for this entry FirefoxCutAndPasteBug]].
If you look up at the breadcrumbs at the top (and at the HTML
source), the name of the page is structured like this. As it happens,
I do a lot of selecting the filenames of existing entries when I'm
writing new entries (many of my entries refer back to other entries),
so I hit this all the time.
(Ironically I would not have hit this issue if I didn't care about
making the HTML generated by DWiki look neat. The breadcrumbs are
autogenerated, so there's no particular reason to indent them in
the HTML; it just makes the HTML look better.)
This entry is also an illustration of the use of writing entries
at all. Firefox has been doing this for years and years, and for
those years and years I just assumed it was something known because
I never bothered to narrow down exactly when it happened. Writing
this entry made me systematically investigate the issue and even
narrow down a minimal reproduction so I can file a Firefox bug
report. I might even get a fixed version someday.
PS: If you use Firefox on Windows or Mac, I'd be interested to know
if this cut and paste issue happens on them or if it's X-specific.