Re: Selection changes

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

On 23/07/10 11:32, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> Is the list of default values in this entry all that was modified?

It's those settings that cause the behaviour changes.   Menu-bar 
bindings were changed too, though not in a manner that would affect w32 
AFAICS.

There were/are various bugfixes arising from problems highlighted by the 
changes, of course.

> That is, if the user reverts all of these values to their previous
> defaults, would she have the previous behavior?

Though remembering the fact the previous defaults were different on 
different platforms - so on w32:
select-active-regions nil
x-select-enable-clipboard t
; x-select-enable-primary nil
mouse-drag-copy-region t
(global-set-key [mouse-2] 'mouse-yank-at-click)

Binding the menu bar items back to their old defaults would be required 
for a technically complete reversion, that would matter mostly on x11 
(the old menu bar used to force use of the clipboard, since the old 
defaults on x11 had x-select-enable-primary t / 
x-select-enable-clipboard nil).

AFAIK the use of rebinding (mouse-2, menu-bar) rather than rewriting the 
existing functions to which they were bound to honour some additional 
customization booleans (as in some earlier iterations of this...) does 
make it impossible to use pure customization theme functionality to 
encapsulate the changes.

 > In general, the behavior on MS-Windows does not need to change,
> because there's no primary selection on Windows.

There is no real primary selection, but that doesn't actually mean the 
default behaviour didn't merit changing on w32 too.  Windows apps do 
_not_ typically overwrite the clipboard upon mere selection of text (nor 
do x11 apps for that matter). "windows has no primary selection" does 
_not_ mean "the windows clipboard can be considered some sort of a 
substitute primary selection that is okay to overwrite willy-nilly".

Yes, some may view the w32 clipboard-eating as a "feature" (and even 
want it expanded to catch all the cases consistently, which would at 
least be consistent - i.e. the proposed "clipboard-active-regions") 
and/or consider making w32 emacs work more like other apps (whether 
other w32 apps, x11 emacs or other x11 apps) a non-goal.  In any case, 
the feature is still available, whether it's on by default or not is a 
different matter.