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

[George Peter Staplin]

Quoted "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed at gmail.com>:

> As an end user, I don't want to know or care about pasteboard vs.
> primary X selections.  I want Edit->Copy to copy and Edit->Paste to
> paste, whether I'm in X11 or not.  Adding another menu item just
> confuses me, and I'm never going to be sure which one to use.  HIG or
> no HIG, that's a bad design.

Well then, your pasteboard will be out of sync with reality.

You could type text into an X11 widget and copy it to the clipboard  
with Edit->Copy.  With the design that Jeremy is proposing it gets the  
data and transfers it to the pasteboard as I understand it.

Now, let's imagine you keep typing text and do another Edit->Copy.   
The text has changed, but the owner has not.  The application didn't  
get a SelectionClear message so as far as it's concerned it shouldn't  
have to call XSetSelectionOwner again.

So now you do another XQuartz Edit->Copy, and now the text you paste  
is only the first (old) text still.  It doesn't make much sense, does  
it?  The user will be confused, and wonder what happened to the new  
text.

I don't think it's reasonable to patch every toolkit to call  
XSetSelectionOwner everytime the PRIMARY or CLIPBOARD selection changes.


> On 9/12/08, George Peter Staplin <georgeps at xmission.com> 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)
>> Copy Clipboard  (always copies CLIPBOARD to PB)
>> Paste           (makes pbproxy own PRIMARY and CLIPBOARD)
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> George
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> Mark J. Reed <markjreed at gmail.com>
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