Re: Saving the selection before killing

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

>     But I think asking people to try it out will not result in many
>     responses.  People who like it will start using it silently, and
>     people who don't like probably will not try it.  The only way to
>     get more opinions is to install it and wait for a reaction.
>
> I think people on this list will tell us what they think of it.
> Would people please try installing it and report what they think?

The main problem I saw with it was working over non-local X
connections where it could lead to annoying and inexplicable
slowdowns.

That is not the normal use case, but it is a situation where being
able to still work with Emacs would be important.  I remember that
there has been a _lot_ of people complaining about inexplicable
slowdowns on the XEmacs developer list, and the general advice was to
disable some hooks that provided a similarly "sensible" default
behavior with respect to possibly unrelated selections.

I don't know the details, though, but it probably was the somewhat
different case of every Emacs kill command copying stuff to the
clipboard or so (or some clipboard application milking a selection
whenever one was available).

Anyway, the point is that this was also not detected as a problem in
testing, and still caused frequent annoyance for people with not too
unusual X setups.  So I'd be careful of milking selections by default.
Maybe one reasonable test case would be two Emacs sessions side by
side.  Oh, by the way: does Emacs see its own selections?

-- 
David Kastrup