Re: Need help with emacs clipboard.

[Bob Proulx <bob@proulx.com>]

Robert Thorpe wrote:
> I agree with your description of these facilities, and I now see why you
> setup things the way you do.  Except one thing....
> 
> You write:
> > 1. Click and hold mouse-1, drag, release.  Text is highlighted and
> > placed into the primary selection.  Click mouse-2.  Primary selection
> > is pasted as input.  Generally everywhere but in Emacs v24 this was
> > changed to use the clipboard by default instead of the primary selection.

Same for you too, right?

> Then later on:
> > Note that in your words "If I mark something" that at that time it has
> > already been placed into the primary selection using the X Window
> > System behavior.  You can immediately paste that with the mouse middle
> > button.
> 
> The behaviour you describe in the latter paragraph still works for me in
> Libreoffice and Firefox.  So, I don't see why you say in the former
> paragraph "Generally everywhere but in Emacs v24 this was changed to use
> the clipboard by default instead of the primary selection."

Does that mean when you mouse-2 paste in Libreoffice and Firefox that
it uses the clipboard there instead of the primary selection?  For me
it definitely uses the primary selection.  I verified that to be true
before writing my last message.

> I don't see that it has been changed much.  Like you say yourself, when
> you press C-c or C-x it's placed on the clipboard.  The only thing I've
> noticed change is that C-v in those programs pastes the clipboard not
> the primary selection.

Same for me too.  If I use C-v it would paste from the clipboard.  But
C-v is not the mouse-2 middle button.  It is the mouse middle button
mouse-2 paste that I was talking about that uses the primary
selection.  (Although my notes show that Emacs did for at least a
while paste from the clipboard with mouse middle.  That was a problem.
It doesn't do that today.  Thankfully.  I will stop complaining that
it did.)

But for me if I have highlighted text with the mouse using the left
button it is trivially easy to middle click to paste it.  Your hand
stays on the mouse and thought stays with the mouse hand.

It also seems silly to highlight and then also do C-c when the text is
already available for pasting without doing C-c.  Plus in a terminal
window C-c would send an interrupt so most definitely not what anyone
wants.  How do the Microsoft folks do that in a terminal?.  So using
C-c and C-v is anti-ergo for me.  With C-c already being used to send
a SIGINT to interrupt shell processes it just doesn't make sense to
me.

I do acknowledge that *replacing* highlighted text is a valid
functional mode.  I can see people really liking it.  That is only
reason for having an explicit and separate key to cut or paste.  It
just isn't the way it works in X and therefore collides with it.

In X I paste the new text at the beginning and then C-k or C-d to
delete the old text.  That is the same effort in that case.  But I
definitely understand that people like the replaced highlighted text
feature.  It just isn't something I need or want because I didn't grow
up with it.

> Perhaps Firefox and Libreoffice are setup different by distro makers.

Definitely possible.  I am using Debian.  And I would definitely
expect it to be different on MS Windows and there are a lot of MS
Windows users.

Bob