Re: [Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>] Re: copied item going away when you close the window you copied from

[Oskar Liljeblad <osk hem passagen se>]

On Saturday, February 24, 2001 at 01:27, Keith Packard wrote:
> 
> > The opinion that should be promulgated is that CLIPBOARD is the
> > clipboard, and that PRIMARY is just a short-cut way of pasting
> > that X experts can use. 
> 
> PRIMARY is not a short-cut, it's a different model.  PRIMARY is the locus 
> of the users intent.  Every time you select anything on the screen, that 
> application should assert PRIMARY.  I would go even farther and suggest 
> that any time the locus of activity moves, the PRIMARY selection should 
> follow; click in a text widget, and the PRIMARY selection should return 
> what page/line/file the user is typing at.

Many applications do the other thing as well - when PRIMARY changes,
they unselect the currently selected objects on screen (done by netscape,
nedit, xterm). This is IMHO broken behavior. There is no reason (AFAIK)
that two running applications should not be able to have different
(visual) selections on screen.

Also, consider a Find-and-Replace dialog in a text editor. Such
dialog usually has two text entries. The editor nedit has a
feature called "Replace in selection" which allows you to
perform the replacement operation on the selection in the
main window only. Unfortunately, if you happen to select some text
in the text entries in the dialog, you loose the main window
selection. All you have to do it all over...

In some applications (especially xterm), it is impossible to
insert the contents of CLIPBOARD. (It would make MORE sense if
MiddleMouse inserted PRIMARY and Shift+Insert CLIPBOARD.)

<my opinion>
An application should utilize either CLIPBOARD or PRIMARY,
not both. One reason they choose CTRL+X/C/V for cut/copy/paste
clipboard contents in many modern application is probably that
you can use the mouse with one hand while pressing CTRL+X/C/V
with the other. With select with mouse+insert with MMB you
risk losing the selection by selecting something else by
mistake (I often do this!). The middle mouse button could
be used for more important tasks than paste PRIMARY
(such as paste CLIPBOARD :)...
</my opinion>

Oskar Liljeblad (osk hem passagen se)