Emacs kill/copy under X versus under Windows

[Jeff Clough <jeff@chaosphere.com>]

While dinking around with kill/yank and copy/paste to answer a question 
posted earlier, I stumbled upon something that I'd like to know how to fix.

Running 22.3 on both Windows and X, I notice a difference in how Emacs 
interacts with the clipboard.

Under X, killing and yanking text with the "normal" commands (such as 
kill-line) only diddles the kill ring and doesn't touch the clipboard 
selection.  Copying text in another application does not affect what you 
get when doing C-y in Emacs.  C-y doesn't care about your clipboard 
selection at all and neither does C-k, etc.  When you *do* care about 
such things, there are specific commands (like "Copy" from the menu) 
that let you do things.

Under Windows, this isn't true at all.  Whatever you last killed goes 
straight to the clipboard, and whatever you last copied in another 
application gets dumped into your buffer with a yank.  What's worse, try 
this in Windows:

1.  Type a line of text in Emacs and do a kill-line on it.
2.  Copy a different line of text from some other application.
3.  Do a (car kill-ring) in emacs.  See it display the text you typed 
from step #1.
4.  Do a C-y in emacs, this dumps in the text from step #2.
5.  Do (car kill-ring) again and see that the text from #2 has magically 
been added to the kill ring.

I should note that C-y, C-k and the like are all mapped to functions 
with the same names on both platforms (yank and kill-line, respectively) 
and doing a describe-function on these functions has no hint they should 
be working any differently.

So we have different behavior between ports for I don't know what reason 
(is it really assumed that someone capable of downloading and using 
Emacs on their Windows box is going to be confused by the behavior found 
on X systems?), and some *truly* nutty behavior under the Windows side.

Is there some way to make Emacs on Windows behave itself and ignore the 
clipboard unless told otherwise, just like under X?

Jeff

-- 

Author of the Genesys System
A "free" universal role-playing game.
http://www.chaosphere.com/genesys/