Re: kill-new discards current X selection

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

Sam Steingold wrote:
> When I select a word in an xterm and then kill in emacs, then X 
> selection is gone forever, replaced with the emacs kill.
> The appended patch prepends the current X selection to kill-ring before 
> replacing the X selection with the current Emacs kill.
> Is it OK to install it unconditionally, or is it better to guard it with 
> a user option, e.g., save-interprogram-paste-before-kill?
> 

I'd certainly like that to be optional if it's going in at all. That's 
not to say it's necessarily a bad feature.  But it's not usual behaviour 
in the slightest.

"the" x selection is also an inaccurate way of looking at things -
if you had turned off x-select-enable-primary and turned on
x-select-enable-clipboard, then killing in emacs wouldn't
(necessarily) nuke the xterm's primary, as killing would
be going to the clipboard.   Of course, since you can't specify
incoming and outgoing behaviour separately (a feature that was however
part of my "giant matrix of every silly selection behaviour possible" 
patch a good while back), you also couldn't pull in primary upon yanking 
with those settings...

OTOH, if you'd set emacs select-active-regions, primary might be gone 
already if you used a region to define what to kill, as that would
cause emacs to send whatever's highlighted onscreen in emacs straight to 
primary (but not clipboard!).