Re: terminals and urls and copying

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From: peter (Peter da Silva)
Subject: Re: terminals and urls and copying
Date: 19:06 on 24 Mar 2004
> Cut-and-paste in X is so very hateful.  For most apps, merely hilighting
> text is sufficient to put that text into the "clipboard", thus clobbering
> whatever was in there previously.  Having a keystroke combination to do
> this taskand avoid accidental deletion of data would be too complicated
> for the designers of these programs.

Having to hit some key to actually copy some selected text is hateful.

Having selected text replace what was previously selected rather than just
keeping track of the last <n> selections and letting you pop, push, or
otherwise molest them is hateful.

How it's implemented, whether you copy to a clipboard or just keep a handle
that the program can respond to, that's irrelevent. There are systems that
do a physical copy when the selection is made, that do a copy if a new
selection is made without pasting, that do a copy when the program wants
to free its buffer, that never do a copy unless asked by a clipboard manager,
and so on. They all manage to suck.

> So, xterm is too dumb to keep highlighted text selected if it scrolls up
> the screen (even though it *knows* that it's scrolling and it *knows*
> exactly where the text you selected ended up) and X is too dumb to use a
> real clipboard and manage the data itself, so your selected text has a
> tendency to vanish.

You're supposed to use a clipboard manager to handle that. The fact that there
isn't one by default is hateful, of course, and I'll bet that if you look for
one you'll hate all the ones you find you'll hate them too. I know I do.

There's stuff above here

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