bug#6701: 24.0.50; Cut and paste with mouse-3/mouse-2 no longer works

[David De La Harpe Golden <david@harpegolden.net>]

On 22/07/10 09:47, Matthieu Moy wrote:
> Hi,
>
> The latests changes in the way selection works broke a nice feature
> (I'd say killer-feature ;-) ) of Emacs<= 23. Not only copy-paste
> works with mouse, but also _cut_-and-paste:
>


I confess I was aware of a problem in that area in conjunction with 
settings corresponding to the latest changes, though it had slipped my 
mind (comes from the days before the bug tracker, at least before it had 
stabilised):

It is the reason why, a couple of years ago, I proposed a setting to 
allow  some alternative behaviour for mouse-3 (mouse-save-then-kill):

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2008-02/msg01018.html

Unfortunately I doubt the patch applies cleanly right now owing to 
reworking of the mouse layer in the interim.  I can look at it this weekend.

Hopefully the _reason_ I proposed the change is becoming a bit clearer 
to people other than me now...

How I suggested mouse-3 should act at the time (Yes, this means learning 
to do an extra click for some operations, but
it makes mouse-3 actually useful with the new settings, at least when it 
hasn't been replaced by a context menu anyway):

first mouse-3 click: adjust region (only), thereby also adjusting 
primary when select-active-regions enabled (as it now is).

second mouse-3 click: copy region to kill-ring/clipboard

third mouse-3 click: cut region to kill-ring/clipboard (using same slot 
as copy to avoid duplication).

Note mouse-2 click will insert the cut region even though bound to 
mouse-yank-primary, since the first click will have put it there*.

* One caveat - this may also require certain of the 
no-zero-length-region fixes to work entirely correctly. (Apologies, 
Chong Yidong knows what I'm talking about here).