Re: [Nautilus-list] Re: [gnome-love] GNOME user environment brainstorming

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Ettore Perazzoli <ettore ximian com> writes:
> On 28 May 2001 13:37:36 -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > 
> > Calum Benson <calum benson ireland sun com> writes: 
> > > I vote for a "Copy to clipboard"
> > 
> > People would really get bit by the fact that they can't paste anymore
> > after closing this dialog, I bet. Weird X quirk.
> 
>   Not if we get decent clipboard support into GNOME by 2.0.  :-)
> 

Clipboard support isn't really the issue. The problem is that there's
a tradeoff at the moment. You can run an app like "xclipboard" which
immediately harvests all clipboard contents and saves them, so they
hang around after apps exit. This app need not have a GUI as
xclipboard does, it can just be an invisible daemon.

However, if you do this, it has downsides:

  a) inefficient, all cut/copied data is immediately shipped to the X
     server and then back to the clipboard daemon, then on paste back
     to the X server and back to the client. you might care if you
     copied a giant image or text file
 
  b) freezes the clipboard data in a fixed format (an app can offer
     various targets for the data, e.g. UTF-8 or older encodings, or
     PNG vs JPEG); the clipboard daemon has to pick one format to
     request and save and may lose data or prevent pasting to 
     certain clients.

So the ideal solution is something like this: on exit, apps signal the
clipboard daemon to harvest their selection, and while the app is
running it owns the selection itself.

But that requires an extension to the selection/clipboard protocol.

See http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/clipboards.txt of course, it
mentions this briefly at the end.

Havoc