Clipboard daemon

[Murray Cumming Comneon com]

I still hope GNOME can solve the "You have to keep the first application
open when you copy/paste to a second application" problem.

Hongli Lai wrote a small daemon to fix the problem,
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2003-September/msg00193.ht
ml
but it has problems. I talked to Hongli and he says

"
Basically it's memory usage. My patch behaves exactly like 
Klipper/xclipboard: it fetches *all* content from the clipboard and 
claims ownership, and repeats this every time another application tries 
to own the clipboard. They say the performance loss is especially 
noticable when copying something in Gnumeric, because Gnumeric provides 
targets in many different formats.
"

and

"
They say that a better solution would be transferring the clipboard data 
to the daemon just before the app exits. This is very difficult to 
implement, and requires modification in GTK+(/QT/other toolkits) and 
maybe even in the app itself. I don't think I'm skilled enough to do that.

Also, Mike Hearn sent a mail explaining how the clipboard in Windows 
works. Basically, the old clipboard keeps all data in memory, so it's 
still available after you exit an application. But the new Win32 (OLE) 
clipboard is very similar to the X clipboard: data is only transferred 
when needed, and will be lost if you close the app. He says it's not 
wise to move to a direction that Microsoft is moving away from.
"

I can't believe that Windows is trying to have the same problem as X in
future. Maybe it's just the big, complex, clipboard formats that get lost.
But I think that would be confusing unless there was some dialog saying
"What you are pasting is not going to be ideal, because you closed the other
application.". Actually, Windows 2000 and/or Office XP do seem to have some
bizarre choose-your-paste-format features (funny little triangles and
question marks after you've pasted something) but it's far from usable.

Does anyboday have any idea how we can move this issue forward?

Murray Cumming
www.murrayc.com
murrayc usa net