Re: Discontinuation of GNOME Clipboard Manager

[Philip Van Hoof <spamfrommailing freax org>]

On Fri, 2004-03-26 at 13:38, Murray Cumming wrote:

> > 
> > To have a history of your Clipboard, one has to steal every Clipboard
> > ever set from the applications setting Clipboards.

> [snip]
> I would be interested in your opinion of the clipboard situation if we
> ignore clipboard history. I don't personally think that a clipboard
> history is worth worrying about very much.

The major issues at this moment probably are that

a) The clipboard implementation of X is not scalable enough to transfer
larger Clipboard data from one application to another. Look at the
Mozilla bug (about the 4000 bytes). It's probably both an issue in
Mozilla and an issue caused by the fact that actually..the mechanism is
just not suitable to copy-and-paste huge amounts of data. (And by huge I
mean: Up to 60 mb of data, why not?)

b) When an application owning the clipboard shuts down, no application
cares about the clipboard content it is/was owning. It basically means
that the clipboard is lost with the application-instance. It's very hard
or maybe impossible to know when the application currently owning the
clipboard is going to be shut down (I have not tried this, yet).

c) Not much applications agree upon each other clipboard formats (the
TARGETS Atom). Some very common formats should be agreed upon. For
example, every application should at least set a "TEXT" and a
"text/html" target.

For example: This has been fixed but even the formatting of the data
itself was not in sync between some applications. Some time ago
OpenOffice.Org used UTF-8 and Mozilla UTF-16 for the formatting (I can
be wrong here, I don't remember it very well). It rendered
copy-and-pasting text with layout between both applications impossible.
GNOME Clipboard Manager actually made it possible when you loaded a
plugin in GCM that converted the format to something which both
applications understood. It's pretty sick that my Clipboard Manager had
to do this in the first place. Where Mozilla Composer and OpenOffice.org
fighting each other or something? I mean .. helllooww people?

d) It is impossible to know when a change of the clipboard-ownership has
happened. You can only know when you loose clipboard ownership. This
makes it very difficult to ever create a Clipboard Manager.



-- 
Philip Van Hoof, Software Developer @ Cronos
home: me at freax dot org
work: Philip dot VanHoof at cronos dot be
http://www.freax.be, http://www.freax.eu.org