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

Jeremy Huddleston jeremyhu at berkeley.edu
Thu Sep 11 07:19:59 PDT 2008


I don't really like the idea of adding more to applewm or the menus.   
I'm thinking we should just have the pbproxy code on a thread in the  
server and not make it so difficult for someone to run other wm.  The  
extra menus make our life easier to implement and less ambiguous but  
hurt the user experience.

The default option for copy should be PRIMARY to pb.

We should have an option that changing CLIPBOARD causes that to be  
proxies to pb.  The reason being that users don't want to copy twice  
(once to CLIPBOARD then to pb).  Additionally, most users don't  
understand what that would even mean.

The user almost never expects the copy action in our menu to copy  
CLIPBOARD.

On Sep 9, 2008, at 13:24, George Peter Staplin <georgeps at xmission.com>  
wrote:

> 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/
> _______________________________________________
> Xquartz-dev mailing list
> Xquartz-dev at lists.macosforge.org
> http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/xquartz-dev


More information about the Xquartz-dev mailing list