Re: x-selection-exists-p vs x-get-selection

[Jason Rumney <jasonr@gnu.org>]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> And there's no meaning to
> ``owner'' of the clipboard contents, since the stuff is already in the
> clipboard and is ``owned'' by the GUI subsystem of the OS.
>   

There are two ways to use the clipboard in Windows. One is to put stuff 
on the clipboard, handing over ownership to Windows. The other is to 
claim ownership of the clipboard, and if and when another program wants 
to paste, you get a message requesting to render the contents to the 
clipboard. Emacs was changed to use the latter method some time ago, as 
it is much more efficient for cases where the clipboard data is only 
ever used inside Emacs.

Also, I think we support primary and secondary selection within Emacs 
even on Windows, but there is no standard way to support this between 
programs (though Cygwin X probably has a convention we could follow if 
someone feels this is important enough to work on).