Re: [gentoo-user] problems with clipboard separation

[Bryan Whitehead]

It boils down to underneath everything is Xlib and the guts of X. The
guts of X have many ways to do the same thing and the result is QT,
GTK, KDE, GNOME, etc all end up messing with a different piece of how
X should handle cut/paste. As another post points out - there seems to
be 2 different ways of doing cut/copy/paste. It seems that many like
the second way - or just completely ignore "changing" how the second
way operates. I would gamble you might have a couple of applications
that specifically change how each of the cut/paste methods work
because the programmer is a nazi and thinks only one way is good (for
example maybe he hates using the "primary way" so he makes the "second
way" fudge the "first way").

As an example, it looks like the Firefox/Mozilla people want to
enforce the "first way". So people like me (who love highlighting and
clicking) get pissed off because the behavior is changed in JUST
firefox. It doesn't feel consistent. I can also see why someone would
be a nazi (like the realplayer people are) for the "second way". Do
you know how annoying it is to highlight something in a dtterm in
Solaris and then you can't paste it into something else? For example,
I highlight in firefox, but it doesn't paste in my xterm... and my
xterm doesn't seem to like any combination of Ctrl-V, etc

The thing is, mozilla/firefox are GTK apps. It could be that GTK just
doesn't give a crap about cut/paste which leaves the programmer to do
whatever he/she wants. Which resultes in randome GTK applications
acting different.

Yes, it is a bunch of BS and it is why many people just stick to KDE
or GNOME... rejecting other software. However, it is this fully
tweakable aspect of X11 that gives us the many different windows
managers, applications, headaches, and flaming mailing lists.

On Nov 16, 2007 8:12 AM, Crayon Shin Chan <crayon.shin.chan.uk@×××××.com> wrote:
> On Friday 16 November 2007, Bryan Whitehead wrote:
> > This is the default behavior of X. Highlighting IS copying to the
> > clipboard.
>
> My point is that text which I did not *specifically* highlighted should
> never be placed in the clipboard (whether primary/secondary/whatever).
> Real life example:
>
> 1) in firefox/mozilla using CTRL-L will highlight the address url so you
> can quickly replace it with something else, you can also use CTRL-V to
> paste in something off the clipboard because firefox/mozilla does not
> affect the clipboard when the address url is highlighted.
>
> 2) in Realplayer using CTRL-L will bring up a dialog where you can type in
> a url, the current url is displayed in the dialog and is already
> highlighted. However realplayer has also overwritten the clipboard with
> the current url, which in 99.9999% of cases is NOT what a user wants,
> because now I cannot paste in a new url without having to first delete
> the current url, then go back and copy the new url and finally paste it
> into realplayer.
>
> > This is just how X works. Getting around this is a
> > hack in itself.
>
> But how is it that all KDE programs have "hacked" it so that it behaves
> correctly (IMO), whereas some gtk based programs like realplayer are just
> so clumsy (to put it charitably).
>
> --
>
> Crayon
> --
> gentoo-user@g.o mailing list
>
>
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