Re: Improving X selection?

["David De La Harpe Golden" <david.delaharpe.golden@gmail.com>]

On 25/12/2007, Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> wrote:
> Please forgive the delay in this response.  It was not easy for me to
> read and understand your message, and I was rather rushed when it
> arrived, so I put it off.  Now I have more time.
>

Thanks for applying the changes, and argh, in turn, please forgive me!
I don't like the strange gmail web interface (particularly when
applied to a high-traffic lists...l), only just found your reply  :-(

> If I understand right, your scheme is that mouse clicks should set
> and access the primary selection, but not the kill ring or the clipboard;
> meanwhile, the kill ring keystroke commands should access the clipboard
> in parallel with the kill ring.
> Did I understand correctly?
>

Essentially, but see *** about setting of the primary selection.

> I would not be entirely happy with that, because I would rather have
> some way to interact with the primary selection from the keyboard.

*** Well, indeed.   In part  3 of the hack, where I used
activate-mark-hook (used in transient-mark-mode),  by the description
of activate-mark-hook, I was expecting activate-mark-hook to be called
and therefore primary to be set whenever the mouse IOR the keyboard
was used to set or adjust the active region and transient-mark-mode
was on, but it doesn't seem to quite work as intended (not sure as yet
whether that's my fault or a bug, should investigate further I guess).
 If it were working as I expected, it would reflect the behaviour of
other recent X11 applications, where using the keyboard to highlight
sets primary just like using the mouse does.

I realise you're probably not using transient-mark-mode, though.  But
if x-select-enable-primary is non-nil, then x-select-text*  propagates
back out to primary, so you can still affect primary from the keyboard
if you want, just use different settings.   Even more flexibility (and
potential for confusion...) might be to have 4 (6? - secondary :-)
separate  x-select-enable-[primary|clipboard]-for-[cut|paste]
settings, in case people want things squirted out to primary but not
sucked in from it and so on.