Re: Selection changes in revno 100822

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

On 15/08/10 18:59, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> Date: Sun, 15 Aug 2010 18:27:37 +0100
>> From: David De La Harpe Golden<david@harpegolden.net>
>> CC: "Stephen J. Turnbull"<stephen@xemacs.org>, emacs-devel@gnu.org,
>>   miles@gnu.org
>>
>> On 15/08/10 16:20, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>>
>>> As of yesterday, mouse-2 on Windows pastes from the clipboard (and
>>> falls back on the emulated PRIMARY if the clipboard is empty).
>>
>> Er... really? Did you mean paste from the emulated primary and fall back
>> to the clipboard?
>

Ah, w32 x-get-selection-value is only returning the clipboard the first 
time it is called, subsequent calls return nil if the clipboard is 
unchanged, it's following the interprogram-paste-function  protocol.

I thought you meant you were inserting the clipboard if the clipboard 
was nonempty every time, and was wondering how that made any sense given 
AFAIK the w32 clipboard is seldom empty except momentarily when it's 
just been emptied before an app puts something on it, so the emulated 
primary would basically never be inserted.

Still, I'm not at all sure this is what you wanted, even leaving aside 
higher-level "david thinks it's fundamentally wrong"* issues:

A C-y after such a mouse-2 won't insert the current w32 clipboard unless 
it has changed since the mouse-2, because it's already been "consumed" 
(put on w32 x-last-selected-text)   Nor will the mouse-2 have put it on 
the kill ring, so it won't be available via M-y either.
What happens when you press mouse-2 twice in a row when it's inserted 
from the w32 clipboard.

All a tad weird for my taste, but /I/ don't have to use it.

* I _still_ think it'd be better to bind mouse-2 back to 
mouse-yank-at-click, then supply customizations that allow control over 
whether mouse-yank-at-click gets from the primary, the clipboard (or 
both), and whether it side-effects the kill-ring (pushes what it just 
got onto it
as well as inserting it into the buffer).

Then on w32, w32-specific defaults to those customizations could mean 
mouse-2 could then get from the clipboard, maybe even side effect the 
kill-ring, until such a time as w32's primary is ready.

Seems I started proposing something like that around Feb 2008*, so, 
well, obviously I'm failing to communicate why it's desirable.

At the time, I used the variable names:

(mouse-yank-enable-kill-ring nil)
(mouse-yank-enable-system-clipboard nil)
(mouse-yank-enable-system-current-selection t)


* See (emacs-devel list archive isn't responding for me, sorry no link):

Message-ID: <8e24944a0802161938i736d4bb2x854e37a4042076bb@mail.gmail.com>
Date: Sun, 17 Feb 2008 03:38:14 +0000
From: "David De La Harpe Golden" <david.delaharpe.golden@gmail.com>
To: "Stefan Monnier" <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>
Subject: Re: Improving X selection?
Cc: "Horsley, Tom" <Tom.Horsley@ccur.com>,
	"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>,
	"Jan D." <jan.h.d@swipnet.se>, rms@gnu.org, emacs-devel@gnu.org
In-Reply-To: <jwvk5lfczjk.fsf-monnier+emacs@gnu.org>