Re: Selection changes

[Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>]

David De La Harpe Golden <david@harpegolden.net> writes:
> N.B. that definitely needs to be _off_ for bringing emacs in line with
> other apps.  If it's on, it means C-y inserts primary and pushes primary
> onto the kill ring.

Why is that bad?

After all absolute consistency in the sense of "do _exactly_ what other
apps do" is not the goal.  The goal is for Emacs to work smoothly and
intuitively with other apps -- and those other apps include those which
use selections rather than the clipboard.

I'm not arguing based on principle, but rather because I've been using
it that way (with x-select-enable-primary set to t) for many years with
many other standard apps of both sorts, and it seems to work almost
perfectly this way.  So I'm very wary of changing it for polemic reasons.

In particular:

  * selecting some text in a cut/past style app, and invoking "copy" in
    that app, should allow the copied text to be pasted in emacs with
    C-y.

  * selecting some text in a selection-using app (e.g. xterm) should
    allow the selected text to be pasted in emacs with C-y.

Thanks,

-Miles

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