Clipboard for the dummies

[Maksim Orlovich]

On Fri, 1 Nov 2002, Lubos Lunak wrote:
>  The most in-the-spirit-of-X11 way, which Gtk, xedit use, is like this: 
> Selection is selected text, and selected text is selection (the ONLY 
> selection). Which means:
> - selected text, no matter how selected, will be pasted by MMB
> - if there's nothing selected, MMB won't do anything
> - if you open a dialog with a lineedit which autoselects the text (i.e. the 
> default, but you can start typing whatever you want immediately), this 
> becomes the selection pasted by MMB, and as soon as the dialog is closed, MMB 
> will paste nothing
> - if you select something in one app, previous selected text is unselected, no 
> matter where it was, even in other app (this a bit conflicts with the 'if you 
> don't know about MMB, it won't get in your way at all' claiming)

Personally, I think this
(implementation-centric) model violates one of the stated principles of
the agreed-to clipboard behavior: That Select/MMB clipboard is completely
transparent and invisible to a user, and that Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V matches
semantics many users are used to from Mac and Windows. Basically, I
imagine that if one doesn't know about the implementation details of X
mechanisms, it'd be rather mysterious and annoying to have some text
explicitly selected by the user become unselected after doing something
that appears to be entirely unrelated - i.e. doing something in an another
document or a very different implementation. That's particularly
true if the user doesn't have klipper runnings/isn't familiar with 
its function, and is just keeping a few things selected to make it 
easy to paste multiple items repeatedly (I hav edone that
myself). 

Further, it seems weird that one clipboard would be an imperative one -
i.e. stuff gets copy-pasted when the user asks for it, while the other one
would be more state-based; before reading your description I certainly
thought of selection as an imperative clipboard, too -- that MMB pastes
the last thing selected by the user; but that's not really that big of a
deal if we consider this to be a power-user feature, while affecting a
more "basic" feature's behavior IMHO is...

Thanks,
Maksim