X11 Clipboard implementation

Geoff Thorpe geoff at geoffthorpe.net
Wed Feb 12 10:28:53 CST 2003


* Ulrich Czekalla (ulrich.czekalla at utoronto.ca) wrote:
> On Wed, 2003-02-12 at 10:01, Mike Hearn wrote:
> > I don't agree with that, the X clipboard spec is very clear on this, and
> > most apps are now in compliance. Mixing them together is what Qt used to
> > do, and people found it very confusing when they couldn't figure out
> > what was going on with the clipboard.
> 
> I though you wouldn't ;) As you pointed out, if we can't use text
> selection to pass data via PRIMARY (because Windows apps don't allow
> this) then it follows that we should only use CLIPBOARD. But when I
> select and copy text from Word, I want be able to paste it into my
> xterm! I find this to be a common complaint.
> 
> I guess in Wine we have been simulating the selection of data into
> PRIMARY by assuming that if you copied data into the clipboard you
> probably selected it.
> 
> Your right thought, Wine apps may be somewhat unique but at the end of
> the day its behaviour is non-standard. What does everyone else think?
> This is one area that most people will have an opinion :)

And here's mine ... :-)

I think Mike's right in that CLIPBOARD only should be used unless the
actual visual text-selection itself can be hooked to use PRIMARY (which
it seems probably can't happen in the general case). However I agree
with you that people will want this to work how *they* want it to work,
and the "Right Way" purists can go take a running jump. Or to put it
more constructively, I think this should be configurable, presumably in
the config file. I think as with all such things, the user is always
right.

BTW: I can envisage one day there being built-in Wine configuration and
support in KDE and other all-for-one,one-for-all window managers - this
sort of behaviour is likely to become a tick-box in a KDE configuration
applet at some point just like every other little GUI tweak has become.
Which is cool of course, I would like to control behaviour of the win32
support layer in the same place as I control behaviour of X11-native
applications - so clipboard, mouse, keyboard (etc) should be as
configurable as possible, not forced to be as "correct" as possible
according to any one person's definition.

Cheers,
Geoff

-- 
Geoff Thorpe
geoff at geoffthorpe.net
http://www.geoffthorpe.net/




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