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

[Jeremy Huddleston]

On Sep 12, 2008, at 10:37, George Peter Staplin wrote:

> Quoted Jeremy Huddleston <jeremyhu at berkeley.edu>:
>
>> We want to avoid "when switching fg/bg" because this causes  
>> unexpected
>> bahavior when using pbcopy/pbpaste (the expected behavior would be
>> that pbpaste should paste whatever was just copied via cmd-c)
>
> How about one new menu item?  That's all we need to solve this I  
> think.
>
> Copy            (always copies PRIMARY to PB)

yes

> Copy Clipboard  (always copies CLIPBOARD to PB)

No, we can do this automatically using the greedy-CLIPBOARD-ownership  
approach.

> Paste           (makes pbproxy own PRIMARY and CLIPBOARD)

Eh.  No.  That doesn't exactly "paste" now, does it?  pbproxy should  
automatically own CLIPBOARD and PRIMARY when the PASTEBOARD changes  
(assuming the user has enabled the options to do so).

> This isn't much different than apps that provide 2 Paste modes (Paste,
> and Paste and Reformat (IIRC)) in the menus as far as I see.

Except that those applications actually "paste" the data.  Claiming  
ownership of CLIPBOARD and PRIMARY doesn't actually cause data to  
paste.  It is confusing and ambiguous (when it claims ownership, what  
is actually going to be sent when it is queried?  The PB data?  I'd  
much rather this be automatically done.

> I understand it may be a lot of work to add 1 menu item, because of
> localization, but I think it's the best way.

Changing menus and localization is not a concern you need to worry  
about.

> I personally think it would be more awkward for users to have to
> toggle the option repeatedly to Copy the proper data.  To me this
> violates (my own) HIG more than 1 new menu item.

What do you mean toggle the option repeatedly to copy the proper  
data?  That was never suggested.  When the user does Edit->Copy in the  
Gimp/Nedit/OpenOffice menu, then that triggers CLIPBOARD to be sent to  
PASTEBOARD.  When they do X11.app's Edit->Copy, that sends PRIMARY to  
the PASTEBOARD.  There is no option to toggle X11.app's Edit->Copy to  
do anything other than PRIMARY.


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