Re: Unbreaking the gnome clipboard

[Philip Van Hoof <spamfrommailing freax org>]

On Mon, 2003-06-16 at 19:24, Sriram Ramkrishna wrote:

> Morever, we should be able to cut-n-paste graphics and anything else
> as an end state.  I seem to remember that Mac could do this since the
> 80s with Hypercard.  We are two generations behind on clipboards. ;)

The only reason why this is not possible is because The Gimp is not
using the standard Clipboard-channel provided by X. The Gimp uses an
internal Clipboard mecanism for copy-and-pasting it's selected image
data. 

They should not do that and I have been wining about the issue to Owen
Taylor on FOSDEM in Belgium (He probably hates me now because I kept
pushing the issue, lol - sorry for that Owen -).

The Clipboard of X is not incomplete nor it's to slow for such
operations. Most people just never used the Clipboard correctly and have
always been thinking that people only want to copy-and-paste pure Text
(until Microsoft showed us how a desktop-user Clipboard should be
implemented).

As for The Gimp : they should really really fix their Clipboard issues
if it has not been fixed yet in their current 1.3 beta stuff. 


> I would love to see someone work with Jim, and Xfree guys and others 
> on re-defining our X clipboard protocols to meet the needs of desktop
> projects.  The technical in me laments such a change since I like 
> cut-n-paste the way it works today and it would drive me crazy if I
> was doing sysadmining if I had to explicitly cut-n-paste using 
> CTL-C, CTL-V.

I've had a E-mail conversation with somebody about a Bonobo-clipboard.
The idea is really really great but the implementation is way to hard.
To implement that Bonobo Clipboard "ALL" applications should be fixed..
OR (a) Clipboard Manager should convert every clipboard to such a
Bonobo-clipboard (it's possible that I am going to create this feature
as a plugin for Clipboard Manager some day). The guy also prepared
patches for applications like Mozilla and it does work great.

http://opencjk.org/projects/gclipboard/index.html



> So while I think it's great that we are solving these problems, but we
> should also solve the bigger picture.

Indeed.. 
-- 
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