Re: [Usability]clipboard/selection behavior

[Thomas Leonard <tal00r ecs soton ac uk>]

On Sat, Nov 02, 2002 at 09:47:13PM -0800, Keith Packard wrote:
> Allowing several indistinguishable selected objects on the screen will 
> make PRIMARY useless; we'll have to resort to cut&paste which would be a 
> shame.

Right, you'd need to show multiple selected regions, but highlight the one
corresponding to PRIMARY differently. Clicking on a non-primary selection
makes it PRIMARY (this is how selections work in ROX-Filer, anyway).

As I recall, the main problem with making this work in text entries was
that there would be too many different colours for a selected region:

- Focussed and primary
- Unfocussed and primary
- Focussed and not primary
- Unfocussed and not primary

Personnaly, I don't think the selection should dim when the focus is lost,
since it's still fully active and ready to be pasted with button-2.

But what other indicator can be used for focus? Most widgets get a darker
border, but with text entries the border stays the same for some reason.

I think it could look good if GtkEntry widgets were normally shown with a
light grey border, but changed to the current border style when focussed.

There's also the separate issue of whether the user can create a selection
without taking PRIMARY. Gtk+-1.2 used to allow this, but it probably isn't
really necessary if the user can easily restore the previous (shaded)
selection.


-- 
Thomas Leonard			http://rox.sourceforge.net
tal00r ecs soton ac uk		tal197 users sourceforge net
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