Re: selected text is PRIMARY?

["Alan M. Evans" <ame1 extratech com>]

On Fri, 2006-04-14 at 14:02, Xavier Bestel wrote:
> Yes there is. Witness Evolution and its load of widgets. In its first
> versions, You had to focus the right widget to have keypress do what you
> wanted (e.g. if the trash was last clicked, and you pressed the spacebar
> to pagedown, the current mail was deleted instead). Tha was a mess and
> now keypresses are interpreted nearly independently of the last widget
> you clicked.

This sounds to me like a problem with the application, not the toolkit;
and certainly not with the system's Copy/Paste behavior. If "copying"
the trash icon doesn't make sense in a particular application, then the
application shouldn't do it. Similarly, if pressing spacebar while the
trash icon is focussed does something unexpected, then it's the fault of
the application.
 
> Having Ctrl-C being dependant on the last clicked widget is a bad idea
> in real life.

Why? I'm serious. I just don't see where this causes problems "in real
life." Why does X11 PRIMARY behavior need to be provided to the
exclusion of proper Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V behavior.

I can't think of a single application on any platform where Ctrl-C
doesn't apply to the currently focussed widget. Although I doubt that it
even comes up much in most applications -- who keyboard-navigates to a
toolbar button and hits Ctrl-C? What would the user expect to happen in
that case?

> Your multiple selections look equally bad to me.

Once again: Why? Because this is what a vast majority of users expect?

Any argument formulated around the "X11 tradition" can be countered with
the expectation of the supermajority of current computer users. Inasmuch
as GTK is supposed to be cross-platform, it should at least support the
convention that is prevalant on the two most popular desktop platforms.
Ask a hundred typical users to select text in one app then select text
in another, then ask them if the text in the first app is still
selected. I'm willing to bet that 98 or 99 of them would, after being
surprised by the question, probably respond, "Of course it is. Why
wouldn't it be?"

The existence of multiple selections in desktop applications has never
confused users. At least I've never heard of it happening. Have you?

In any case, nobody (certainly not me!) is suggesting dropping PRIMARY.
Just allowing multiple selections would also allow sensible support for
keyboard Copy/Cut/Paste. I don't see how multiple selections causes
problems for using PRIMARY because, as I've said, middle-click pasting
is virtually always done immediately after selecting, so there's never
any question about what is going to be pasted.