Whatever happened to the Secondary Selection?

["Charles Lindsey" <chl clerew man ac uk>]

For over 20 years, I have been using the secondary-selection (a standard  
feature of the X-Windows system) when editing texts, using the Solaris  
operating system on Sun Hardware. Recently, I have switched to Linux on  
i86 hardware, and have been horrified to find that this valuable feature  
is not supported by modern toolkits and editors. The world seems to have  
forgotten what it was meant for, and yet I believe it is the best thing  
since sliced bread.

This is not the place to explain what the secondary-selection does, and  
why it should be used more widely. To see that, I invite you to visit my  
website at
    http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl/secondary-selection.html
which I hope will persuade you that something needs to be done about it.

Furthermore, to illustrate how it is used, I have implemented an  
Experimental Extension to GTK-3 so that people can try it out for  
themselves and to see how useful it can be for constructing texts (and  
particularly program texts, where there is a common requirement to grab  
existing bits of code - perhaps even just identifiers - from other places,  
whether in the same document or from outside).

My implementation is based on gtk+-3.10.8, because I am using Ubuntu  
14.04LTS "Trusty Tahr", though it may well work on other Linux versions.  
Yes I know 3.10.8 is ancient, but I don't expect my code, which is pretty  
hairy, to be fit for immediate incorporation in current versions of gtk.  
But it now works well enough for it to be tested more widely, and if  
people like it, then I would be happy to join the Developer Team and to do  
the job properly.

So I invite you guys to look at my website, download my code and give it a  
try. I am also making this known on various other lists, because unless  
people try it out (and hopefully like it), there can be no pressure to  
take it further.

Share and Enjoy!

--
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own  
thing------------------------
Tel: +44 161 436 6131                         Web:  
http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl
Email: chl clerew man ac uk      Snail: 5  SK8 3JU, U.K.
PGP: 2C15F1A9      Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4  
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