Re: selected text is PRIMARY?

[Yevgen Muntyan <muntyan tamu edu>]

Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro wrote:

>  Gtk+ is using the X11 selection mechanism and semantics that have been
> defined decades ago.  Other more traditional X11 apps and toolkits honor
> the rule of unselecting their text when they stop being the owner of
> PRIMARY.  
Well, other more traditional toolkits also do not have Ctrl-C
shortcut. And in general they look ancient, and behave (completely)
different from GTK and are incredibly inconvenient for "gui users".

> Why should the Mozilla model be the default?  It's just not
> right to think "there is no installed base of X11 desktop users; they're
> just a minority, let's ignore them and start afresh".
>  
Well, I am not really sure about this. Maybe I belong to minority,
and my option should not be default. I would opt for non-default
option than or absence of option anyway.

>  Interface stability matters too.  You think you increase usability
> with the mozilla selection mode, but consider that you also are changing
> a decades old user interface.  Does the hypothetical improvement of
> usability outweigh the interface breakage?  Absolutely not!  
I do not understand this at all. Stability for stability is nonsense.
Stability is usually important because it's bad from usability point
of view to change things.
But it's usually okay to fix bugs, and I claim that GTK behavior
is a bug, "bug" as in "does wrong thing and makes my life harder".
(Sure, personal opinion and so on, but it's as valid as "GTK works
right").

> Besides,
> middle-click paste is a very useful feature, in spite of being hard to
> discover, and any user will be happy to have it available.
>  
I did *not* propose removing it! I do like it. I just do not believe
that "see selection? that's PRIMARY" is important enough to
disallow multiple selections. I am fine with "select text and it gets
into PRIMARY".

>  IMHO, a good compromise solution would be a different selection color
> for the state "selected in application but not PRIMARY selected", like
> what gtk+ 1.2 used to have in GtkEntry.
>  
Maybe, though I think it would be bad. It would help people who
like current GTK behavior *if* current GTK behavior was changed
to not allow what it does now. I believe it's better just to add an
option.
(And I hate the idea of selected text changing color because I opened
a Find dialog).

Regards,
Yevgen