Re: Compatibility

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Po Lu <luangruo@yahoo.com>
> Cc: tomas@tuxteam.de,  xenodasein@tutanota.de,  emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Mon, 07 Feb 2022 21:49:21 +0800
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> 
> >> Potential tangent, but I really don't believe that this consensus was
> >> influenced by MS-Windows users.  Rather, it was formed by people
> >> generally agreeing that using the primary selection to hold cut text
> >> made little to no sense.
> 
> > Because there was no "Cut" back there, AFAIR, there were only
> > selections.  Windows didn't have selections (still doesn't), so they
> > impregnated us with the clipboard.
> 
> IIRC we had such a cut menu item in Emacs since some time in the early
> Emacs 19 release cycle.

The Emacs parlance for "cut" was "kill"; the "Cut" menu item called
kill-region, which on X would also set the PRIMARY selection.

> CLIPBOARD was also with us since the beginning of selections

Yes, but it was largely unused (except in Emacs on Windows, where we
had no alternative).  I'm quite sure that people whose first computer
ran Windows started promoting the clipboard, because they had no idea
what selections were about and how they worked.