Re: Improving X selection?

[David De La Harpe Golden <david@harpegolden.net>]

René Kyllingstad wrote:
> * Stefan Monnier:
>>> Please ignore this if it's already been hammered to death, but what
>>> about using C-Insert/Shift-Insert for the clipboard?
>>  
>>  That would make a lot of sense to me,
> 
> I guess you're waiting for a patch.  Would anyone who has assigned
> copyrights be willing to do this?
> 

Context:  Emacs already binds S-delete/C-insert/S-insert. Though AFAIK
they do the same thing - including affecting the same X selection(s) -
as C-w/M-w/C-y (or C-x/C-c/C-v  in CUA mode)

Now, I guess what was meant was C-w/M-w/C-y to interact with PRIMARY X
Selection and emacs kill-ring and S-Delete/C-Insert/S-Insert to interact
with CLIPBOARD X Selection and emacs kill-ring.

It'd be yet another peculiar emacs cut/copy/paste thing, still not
meeting fd.o-accustomed user expectations, though at least allowing
separate handling of primary and clipboard without involving menu/toolbar.

Not exactly hard to do, mind.  If x-select-enable-primary
is globally t , and x-select-enable-clipboard is globally
nil (IIRC the defaults, so that C-w/M-w/C-y affect PRIMARY), then the
following achieves it -

(global-set-key [S-delete] 'clipboard-kill-region)
(global-set-key [C-insert] 'clipboard-kill-ring-save)
(global-set-key [S-insert] 'clipboard-yank)

[in-tree, it'd need to be changed in bindings.el and maybe s-region.el
and maybe emulation/pc-select.el  ]

It's definitely kind of handy, but IMO not as handy as my patch. But I
would say that :-)

It'd also be mildly backward-incompatible (unless complicated by
allowing customization I guess), though I would guess virtually no-one
would mind.

[Yes, I know we are in feature-freeze...]