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Aaron Crane <hateful@xxxxxxxxxx.xx.xx> writes: > Moreover, if application A owns the PRIMARY selection, it should offer a > 'Copy' operation which copies it to the CLIPBOARD selection, so that it > survives after you've selected something else. And applications should > distinguish middle-click paste (for the PRIMARY selection) and menu-item > paste (for the CLIPBOARD selection). > > This is how it's meant to work. > > http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/clipboards-spec/clipboards.txt That looks accurate but for one thing: it doesn't clearly specify that you're not supposed to drop PRIMARY if the visible selection goes away for any other reason than someone else asserting PRIMARY. In an abstract user-interface design sort of way, I'm not sure whether that's the Right Thing - but I do know that that's what's wired into my fingers. > Oh, there's way more than that to hate in GNU Emacs's selection > handling. The most insane bit is that M-Backspace (the obvious and > natural way of deleting the word to the left of point) actually > steals the PRIMARY selection. This is because Emacs has an > incredibly half-baked idea that the PRIMARY selection should be > unified with the top of the kill-ring. This doesn't work. For > example, even with transient-mark mode, selecting a region doesn't > assert the PRIMARY selection. No, you have to M-w (the equivalent > of menu-item Copy) to do that. Duh. If you click through the reference to <http://www.jwz.org/doc/x-cut-and-paste.html> at the bottom of the document you referenced, there's a long long rant about Emacs down at the bottom of it. I think what Emacs should be doing is unifying PRIMARY with the region, but *only* in transient mark mode; leaving use of CLIPBOARD to the clipboard-* menu commands; and not making any connection whatsoever between the top of the kill ring and any X selection. Yeah, that means sometimes I'll hit C-y and get some junk instead of the PRIMARY text that I wanted, but I think I can get used to that. Another irritating thing which I noticed just now while composing this message - if you select text in Mozilla, and then you go type awhile in Emacs and hit M-backspace incidentally while doing that, other X clients definitely think Emacs has the primary selection now, but Mozilla DOESN'T DESELECT THE TEXT. Hate. zwThere's stuff above here
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