Clipboard for the dummies

[Havoc Pennington]

Lubos Lunak <l.lunak at suse.cz> writes: 
>  Well, if I don't use the mouse, I can hardly MMB the selection.
>

You can, there are ways to do mouse actions from the keyboard ("mouse
keys"), though you would generally use keyboard shortcuts instead if
available.
 
>  Strictly speaking, this wouldn't be consistent with the pure-X11 style, as 
> the highlighted text wouldn't be the thing  pasted. The URL text may say 
> 'here' while the link may be 'http://here.org'.

Good point.
 
>  I don't think it's so consistent now (ok, this may be because I use mainly 
> KDE apps, while GTK app are at least consistent with each other). E.g. the 
> paper at freedesktop.org doesn't say a thing about how the selection should 
> work from the user's point of view.

I think it's assumed this would be obvious, or something. It
definitely intends to go with the "global selection" model.  I can say
because I wrote it. ;-)
  
>  I think it would be interesting to know the opinion of the GNOME usability 
> team or whatever you call it. Could you please forward them the first mail in 
> this thread, perhaps with short explanation, and see what they say?

Done (I sent the whole thread in the form of a link to the archives).
 
> > On the implementation side what Windows-style means is that we would
> > probably have an X selection for each toplevel window. Maybe it could
> > be called PRIMARY_<WindowID>. Considering the possibility of
> > out-of-process components (and XEMBED), it should really be done via
> > an externally-visible X selection rather than all in-toolkit
> > in-process.
> >
> 
>  No, no, no, even though it might be interesting to see having so many X atoms 
> >;). The underlying system would remain completely the same. It's just about 
> how it would work for the user. All the four diferencies from the pure-X11 
> style I listed require only toolkit/app changes, no change in the system 
> itself.

You're right, that many X atoms would hurt. ;-)

I don't know how you keep using a global PRIMARY though, and make the
selection per-window. It doesn't seem like it would work right to me.

We do need to handle multiple processes in a single toplevel window,
for example, though this could perhaps be done via XEMBED in some way.
 
>  Well, yes. I even wouldn't mind having it the pure-X11 style way. It's just 
> that I find the other way slighly better, and now it's about if it would be 
> worth it, or if it's worth having the option and having to code it for both 
> styles.

My view is that if there's an option, we'll *never* get everything to
work right. But I'm not much of an options guy.

If there's an option it certainly has to apply to all applications,
not just some of them.

Havoc