Re: mouse paste completely broken

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

On 27/07/10 21:59, Sam Steingold wrote:
> the situation is much worse than I first thought.

Emacs kill/yank default interactions with x11 selections on the 
development trunk (not the stable branch) were recently changed to [try 
to] act like recent x11 apps.  So, there are both genuine bugs being 
shaken out and intentional behavioural differences to deal with***.

... But there are definitely real problems switching frames/windows with 
active regions, what you describe is wrong, certainly from a usefulness 
perspective and after accounting for any intentional differences.

A (yes, stupid) workaround is to left click once in window X after 
selecting text in that window X before middle clicking in the other 
window Y.

I for one do intend to look at this and various issues on the various 
gui platforms (x11/ns/w32) in the area that have been made painfully 
obvious by the defaults changes, but as usual I don't have much time 
until this weekend (it is a long weekend...).

Note that I can replicate similar issues in emacs 23.2, really:

emacs -Q
C-x 3
shift-select "is for notes" in LHS *scratch*. It is highlighted.
C-x o to RHS *scratch*

Everything from the start of "is for notes" to the end of the buffer is 
highlighted, because that's where the point was in the other window, and 
select-window is "naive" (it just warps to the point saved in the the 
window).

A fix for select-active-regions somewhat similar to the zero-length 
regions fix proposed approach should certainly be possible - really we 
don't want to propagate the active region of a newly switched-to-window 
until it "really" changes anew post-restoration.

*** In the meantime, if you just want things the way they were, please 
note only defaults were changed, reversion to previous behaviour is 
fairly straightforward.  Right now, applying the settings below will do 
that (unless you used the menu bar cut/copy/paste, in which case they 
need to be rebound too):

1. customize group killing:

x-select-enable-clipboard nil  ; t on w32.
x-select-enable-primary t      ;
select-active-regions nil

2. customize group mouse:
mouse-drag-copy-region t

3. rebind:

(global-set-key [mouse-2] 'mouse-yank-at-click)