Re: State of the X clipboard, and perhaps a solution

[Pat Suwalski <pat suwalski net>]

It was nice reading your mail, there were some good ideas there. 
Comments follow...

Jerry Haltom wrote:
<snip>
> This idea however makes program shutdown non-deterministic. A user
> cannot be assured that just because he told the program to exits, that

I'm not terribly comfortable with having window-less desktop programs 
running. I can think of many situations where something would go wrong 
and would go unnoticed, or be difficult for the average user to kill. If 
there were some bizarre communication problem with the clipboard daemon, 
it might even be that no program would shutdown cleanly.

The idea of a clipboard daemon, of course, is good. And your idea to 
just plop everything into it actually appeals more to me. There would 
simply have to be a limit to how much it could store. Maybe available 
ram over four. Maybe a policy that once something large-ish is pasted, 
it would be wiped from the clipboard.

You could even combine both ideas. When there is communication between a 
program and the clipd, upon exiting the program, if the contents of the 
clipboard are large, tell the user "Contents of clipboard too large to 
maintain when program exits. Your clipboard will be cleared. Are you 
sure you want to continue?". This could be best for the user.

Similar ideas have been implemented in Windows (think multiclipboard, 
back in the day), the way there were extensions on the Mac to allow the 
clipboard to do more, and more recently, late versions of the CorelDRAW 
suite. Upon exit, they ask if you want to keep the contents of the 
clipboard available.

--Pat