Re: emacs24/gtk3 - how to mark rectangle of to primary selection?

[Xah Lee <xahlee@gmail.com>]

On Jun 27, 10:15 am, Aurélien Aptel <aurelien.aptel+em...@gmail.com>
wrote:
> Well, it was longer than expected... Turns out if you don't deactive
> the mark, emacs copies the regular active region. My guess is it
> corresponds to mouse selection: once a region is selected it is copied
> to the primary selection.
>
> (defun my-copy-rect-to-primary ()
>   (interactive)
>   (when (region-active-p)
>     (let ((text (mapconcat 'identity
>                            (extract-rectangle
>                             (region-beginning)
>                             (region-end)) "\n")))
>       (deactivate-mark) ;; lost 30mn because of this
>       (x-set-selection 'PRIMARY text)
>       (message "%s" text))))

hi Aurélien, thank you for coding this.

i tried to use it and it didn't work on Windows.

here's a alt version i coded up for learning:

(defun copy-rectangle-to-clipboard (p1 p2)
  "Copy region as column (rectangle) to operating system's clipboard.
This command will also put the text in register 0. (see: `copy-to-
register')"
  (interactive "r")
  (let ((x-select-enable-clipboard t))
    (copy-rectangle-to-register ?0 p1 p2)
    (kill-new
     (with-temp-buffer
       (insert-register ?0)
       (buffer-string) )) ) )

it does over-ride register 0 content, but i think one can modify it so
it restores, or not using register all together.

 Xah