Re: Whatever happened to the Secondary Selection?

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

Hi;

I read the textual description, mostly because after 20 years of using
X11 I've never even seen an implementation of the SECONDARY selection
protocol outside of Motif applications. GTK+ itself does not implement
anything with the 'SECONDARY' atom, unlike the 'PRIMARY' one —
unfortunately, if I may add.

The GTK+ team is pretty much following the behaviour set out by the
freedesktop.org clipboard specification:

  https://specifications.freedesktop.org/clipboards-spec/clipboards-latest.txt

which was written down in 2000-ish and has been the de facto standard
for the free software desktop since then.

Again: I think it's perfectly fine to let applications take care of
this, especially on X11. The whole PRIMARY/SECONDARY shenanigans are
pretty much the definition of unportable X11 behaviour anyway — i.e.
the Windows and macOS backends do not have any support for
PRIMARY/SECONDARY selections, even if they are part of the available
atoms in GDK, and Wayland had to get an additional protocol extension
to implement PRIMARY behaviour — again, unfortunately.

Ciao,
 Emmanuele.


On 21 August 2016 at 12:07, Paul Davis <paul linuxaudiosystems com> wrote:
> Emmanuele,
>
> did you watch his video?
>
> On Sun, Aug 21, 2016 at 3:07 AM, Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com> wrote:
> > Hi;
> >
> > thanks for your email.
> >
> > GTK+, as a project, tracks bugs and enhancements in Bugzilla -
> > https://Bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=gtk%2b - instead of the
> > mailing list, which is only meant for discussion.
> >
> > Additionally, the latest stable version of GTK+ is 3.20, and we plan to
> > release GTK+ 3.22 by next month.
> >
> > We still (optionally) support the PRIMARY selection on the X11 backend,
> > and some compatibility layer for it on Wayland, but we have no plans on
> > adding support for the SECONDARY selection, as it's both barely specified
> > and, like the PRIMARY, highly confusing for anybody who is not well-versed
> > in 20+ years of use of textual interfaces on the X Windows System.
> > Personally, I would have jettisoned the PRIMARY selection a long time ago as
> > well, but apparently a very vocal minority is still holding tight to that
> > particular Easter egg. Adding support for the even more esoteric SECONDARY
> > selection on the X11 backend when we're trying to move the Linux world
> > towards the more modern and less legacy-ridden Wayland display system would
> > be problematic to say the least, and an ill fit for the majority of
> > graphical user experiences in use these days.
> >
> > It should be entirely possible to add support for the SECONDARY selection
> > inside specific applications, like text editors; or in specific libraries,
> > like VTE for terminal emulators. It would definitely make more sense than
> > trying to apply it to all text entry widgets in GTK+.
> >
> > Ciao,
> >  Emmanuele.
> >
> >
> > On Saturday, 20 August 2016, Charles Lindsey <chl clerew man ac uk> wrote:
> > > 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
> > > AB A5
> > > _______________________________________________
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> > > gtk-devel-list gnome org
> > > https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-devel-list
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > https://www.bassi.io
> > [@] ebassi [@gmail.com]
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > gtk-devel-list mailing list
> > gtk-devel-list gnome org
> > https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-devel-list



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