Re: Pushing text onto the selection buffer

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Guy Harris <gharris@flashcom.net> writes: 
> (<RANT>Note that, the belief of some UNIX users to the contrary, there's
> more to cut-and-paste on UNIX/X systems than "select something and then
> paste it with the middle mouse button" - there's also the same sort of
> clipboard-based cut-and-paste that appears in other window systems.
> 
> GTK+, bless its heart, supports that for text widgets, and Motif also
> supports it; Qt, for some unknown reason, seems to think the universe
> rotates around the PRIMARY selection, causing cut-and-paste between Qt
> applications such as KDE applications, and Motif or GTK+ applications,
> not always to work as one might like.
>

QClipboard is broken; it always uses the primary selection. GTK could
use a somewhat simpler clipboard interface, but Qt goes too far in
this respect and removes important functionality. (I think they should
probably just have QClipboard affect the clipboard selection by
default, most of the time users are expecting that, and be sure to
only use the default QClipboard if cut/copy are selected
specifically, using some non-default clipboard tied to the primary
selection otherwise.)
 
> It might not be a bad idea if GTK+ or GDK were to export
> "clipboard_atom" and do the
> 
> 	clipboard_atom = gdk_atom_intern ("CLIPBOARD", FALSE);
>

IIRC there is no reason to cache atoms this way, because GTK already
caches them (i.e. gdk_atom_intern() is plenty fast, and you might as
well just always call it). However most example code does the caching.

Havoc