[Xquartz-dev] Proposal for PRIMARY and CLIPBOARD Copy/Paste

George Peter Staplin georgeps at xmission.com
Tue Sep 9 13:24:53 PDT 2008


Hi,

I've been working on pbproxy, and examining other X11 selection code.

It seems to me that we need the following menus and corresponding  
messages that the AppleWM could provide to a pbproxy-like app:

Copy Primary
Copy Clipboard
Paste Primary
Paste Clipboard

The reasons are as follows for the Copy menu items:

The existing Copy isn't precise enough.  The user may have text  
selected in an xterm that uses the PRIMARY selection, and an image or  
text copied in the Gimp or another Gtk+ app that uses CLIPBOARD.

This means that it's unclear which selection to Copy to the  
NSPasteboard/pbs.  If we copy PRIMARY then it may not be what the user  
wants.  If we copy CLIPBOARD that may not be what the user wants either.

The reasons for the Paste menu items are as follows:

When calling XSetSelectionOwner to set the X11 selection, it's also  
imprecise to set ownership of the PRIMARY and CLIPBOARD.  The user may  
wonder why the previously selected PRIMARY xterm text selection is no  
longer usable.

I wish the situation could be handled in a simpler manner, but X11  
complicates this for us.  The existing way is ambiguous.

I'm hoping to be able to have the pbproxy code working with these new  
messages from the AppleWM soon.

I wrote an Xlib-based prototype that I showed to Jeremy that supports  
the INCR protocol, so users will be able to paste large amounts of  
text properly from toolkits that use the INCR protocol (such as Tk and  
Xt/Xaw/Motif).  The prototype also supports images, so it should  
eventually be possible to copy and paste images from/to X11.

Any thoughts or opinions on this?


George
-- 
http://www.xmission.com/~georgeps/  http://whim.linuxsys.net
http://code.google.com/p/megapkg/


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