Subject: X11 clipboard vs. selection
From: Petr Tesarik (tesarik@lupa.cz)
Date: Tue May 16 2000 - 13:20:41 CDT
Hi folks!
I looked at the X clipboard code. The situation is that:
1. AFAIK most applications use the selection (property PRIMARY). If I
remember it right, someone working for the GNOME project concluded
that this is the right solution(TM).
2. There is a thing called the clipboard (property CLIPBOARD). The
only application I know that uses this property is xclipboard.
3. There is one more method (used by xv): to set a root window
property "XV_CLIPBOARD" (via XChangeProperty &
XGetWindowProperty). This is a really nasty one but ted editor
seems to support it - and xv is rather popular. :O
So, in the worst case there are 3 possible clipboards. AbiWord chose
to get the clipboard #1 for mouse middle-button and clipboard #2 for
Ctrl+V, Edit/Paste and the Paste icon. This is really BAD, folks.
It leads to weird behavior for the "church secretary". It even lead to
unexpected behavior for me until I discovered the existence of two
unrelated clipboards. It may be rather frustrating to see the middle
button pasting something and clicking the icon pasting something
else. The author of ap_UnixApp.cpp suggested to use the most recent
one at user's option. This sounds like a good idea to me, only - if it
should be optionable at all, that suggested behavior should definitely
be the default.
As a matter of fact, there are other interesting issues regarding
clipboarding:
1. Ted uses a target named "RTF" (not "text/rtf" like AbiWord
does). It contains (surprisingly) pretty nice RTF. It _may_ be
possible to achieve clipboard compatibility with ted. Do you think
it's worth it?
2. Emacs uses a special format when using non-Latin1 encodings (it
prefixes them with "\e-A", "\e-B", etc. sequences). I guess it's
the correct way to encode ISO 10646 under X. We should be able to
paste international text from Emacs.
Is anyone working on the X clipboard code right now? Or can I just
start hacking? :)
Cheers,
-- Petr Tesarik Tel: +420 602 575294 http://www.lupa.cz/
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