Clipboard for the dummies

[Lubos Lunak]

On Friday 01 November 2002 15:01, David Faure wrote:
[snip]
> > - this is why Qt lineedits unselect on focus out, while Gtk ones don't
>
> Hmm, what's the relation? Well, you mean that Gtk lineedits can't do that,
> since that would lose the selected text, but I don't really see why Qt
> lineedits have to do it either. Ok, doesn't matter.
> (Note: they unselect on focus-out-to-another-widget, not when alt-tabbing,
> this confused me a little bit at first, when trying to reproduce this).

 I guess QLineEdit simply does it because that's the way it is in MS Windows. 
This point is not a real problem, it's just that with the X11-pure style it 
can't be that way.

>
> > - when a text is selected elsewhere, previously selected text stays
> > selected
>
> Really? where? In my experience that's not true, all Qt/KDE apps obey the
> X11 principle that there's only one selection - so when a selection
> notification occurs the previous selected text is unselected... Works with
> QTextEdit, QLineEdit, khtml...

 E.g. Kate (select something in Kate, then select something e.g. in xterm). 
QTextEdit and KHTML do unselect, because we (me and somebody else, don't 
remember who) complained - not that I insist it was right, it was just an 
attempt to make it consistent.

[snip]
>
> >  When all this summed up (except for the clipboard and selection mixing),
> > it's the other solution I included in the previous mail (let's call this
> > variant the 'Joe User solution'). Both of the extremes seems most
> > consistent solutions to me, but we can even choose something inbetween.
>
> Hmm, what's the "Joe User solution" exactly? All I can gather from the
> "part II" mail is that there would be support for having multiple "selected
> texts" at a given time, i.e. no automatic "unselecting when a new selection
> is made in another app". IMHO it makes sense to support this _only_ if
> people (e.g. ex-Windows users) complain about this "auto-unselect"
> behaviour. However I wonder if it's really a big annoyance (e.g. my wife,
> too used to Windows, asked for double-click in KDE, but surely never
> noticed the auto-unselect issue).

 The Joe User solution is all the points how we can differ from the X11-pure 
style I listed. These ones:
====
- only text selected by the mouse becomes the selection (i.e. not text 
selected by keyboard, or autoselected lineedits)
- when there's no selected text, selection is still remembered (the last valid 
selection) - this is why Qt lineedits unselect on focus out, while Gtk ones 
don't
- when a text is selected elsewhere, previously selected text stays selected
- explicit actions like 'copy link location' set selection, even if there's no 
text selected (I couldn't find any such action in any Gtk2 app to test, 
Havoc?)
====
( In fact the first point is two posibilities - either it can be only explicit 
selecting only by mouse, or explicit selecting by either mouse or keyboard.)

 We can agree on none, only some of them, or all of them of course. The more 
we select, the harder to be consistent with the others (or rather harder to 
persuade them to change). But we should have only one consistent way of doing 
it, or at most two.

>
> >  I'd personally like the Joe User way of doing it, as I find this one the
> > best from the users point of view, and certain features of the X11-pure
> > style can be seen as misfeatures, but I expect a lot of people wouldn't
> > like this and would want the X11-pure style solution. Maybe we could have
> > a setting for either the Joe User way or the X11-pure style for the old
> > fashioned ones, but we should have a one, at most two ways of doing it -
> > right now, all of the four points above are true in some KDE/Qt
> > apps/widgets and not in others.
>
> Yes.

-- 
Lubos Lunak
KDE developer
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