[Konsole-devel] Bug#40710: Konsole only handles SELECTION, not PRIMARY

[kenny at whitecape.org]

Package: konsole
Version: 1.1 (from kde-base 3.0) (using KDE 3.0.0 )
Severity: normal
Installed from:    Compiled From Sources
Compiler:          gcc 2.95.4
OS:                Linux
OS/Compiler notes: Not Specified

Konsole does not handle selections/copy/pasting properly:

http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/clipboards.txt

- selecting but with no explicit copy should only set PRIMARY, never CLIPBOARD

Selecting text in Konsole copies this text to CLIPBOARD, not PRIMARY - you can verify this by running the 'xclipboard' program, which monitors CLIPBOARD - selecting some text will cause it to appear in xclipboard.

- middle mouse button should paste PRIMARY, never CLIPBOARD

Konsole pastes CLIPBOARD. Copy some text from a working program (i.e. kate 2.0 from kdebase-3.0's main text area)

 - explicit cut/copy commands (i.e. menu items, toolbar buttons) should always set CLIPBOARD to the currently-selected data (i.e. conceptually copy PRIMARY to CLIPBOARD)

Konsole does not even have a copy command; perhaps it should? (Obviously cut would not make sense, but copy seems reasonable.) (I know - this seems to be another bug report. Sorry.)

- explicit paste commands should paste CLIPBOARD, not PRIMARY

This presently is right.

For an example of this "done right", see kate 2.0 from kdebase-3.0; the main text area seems to work correctly for all of the above cases. (The widgets, however, do not, so just use the text area - I suspect there may be an issue somewhere else in KDE or Qt causing this to occur...)

I don't write (meaningful) code yet, but I found these seemingly related Qt 3.x QClipboard methods:
bool supportsSelection () const
[always true on X11, so perhaps not an issue for konsole]
void setSelectionMode( bool enable )
selection selectionModeEnabled () const

(Submitted via bugs.kde.org)