Double-clicking on Ubuntu Linux is difficult

When browsing for patch files on Ubuntu Linux, it is hard to open directories by double-clicking. You have to click really fast, otherwise it will give you the rename directory field instead.

This is because of long-standing Java bug 5076635; it fails to detect the system settings, and falls back to a (very) fast 200ms default.

You can fix the issue by entering the following on the command line:

echo "*multiClickTime: 500" >> ~/.Xdefaults
xrdb -merge ~/.Xdefaults

This will set the double-click time to 500 ms.

It will also improve the double-click behaviour in all other Java programs that rely on Swing’s, e.g. it is said IntelliJ also has this issue.

Note, it also looks like this was fixed by Java 7:

In XToolkit.java they introduced a AWT_MULTICLICK_DEFAULT_TIME constant which defaults to 500, instead of being hardcoded to 200 as it was in Java 6.

I implemented a hacky workaround in commit aa925ac9739e.