Re: select-active-regions

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

Eli Zaretskii wrote:


> Not when you use Emacs, which puts text into clipboard on every kill.
> 

Select-active-regions is essentially not intended to be such an 
operation though, it quite deliberately avoids placing text on the 
kill-ring or clipboard on x11 and ONLY sets primary.

You're muddling mouse-drag-copy-region and select-active-regions I 
think. The former affects the kill ring, and typically though not 
necessarily, x11 select-active-regions users would actually turn off 
mouse-drag-copy-region as what they probably want is:

* keyboard and mouse selection and mouse middle click involves ONLY primary

* keyboard/menu/toolbar kill/kill-ring-save/yank (... cut/copy/paste),
involves ONLY kill-ring_and_clipboard.

Why do they want that? Because it's how quite a lot of other X11 apps 
work nowadays, if you assume the kill-ring is analogous to an extended 
clipboard (as e.g. cua-mode clearly assumes when it does its binding 
trickery).  The point was for emacs to optionally (optionally!) support 
such behaviour, with the following:

(setq x-select-enable-clipboard t)
(setq x-select-enable-primary nil)
(setq mouse-drag-copy-region nil)
(setq select-active-regions t)
(global-set-key [mouse-2] 'mouse-yank-primary)

If you also want C-x/C-c/C-v bindings, you of course also turn on cua-mode.