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Re: copy and paste between Aqua and X11 applications?

Ben Byer wrote:
On Aug 11, 2007, at 1:48 PM, Adam D. I. Kramer wrote:
[]
in X11 does seem kind of inelegant...and the "select is copy when you're in
X11" rule is very likely intuitive for those who use X11 a fair amount; new
users of X11 who do so under Mac OSX would probably figure it out pretty
quickly anyway.

Ok, but you're not talking about the X11 clipboard, you're talking about the X11 PRIMARY selection, which is something completely different :(

Quite right, and in X11 applications like XEmacs you know quite well that they are different. It would be bad if a simple selection would alter the contents of the kill buffer, for example. It would also be bad if a simple selection in an X11 window would destroy the contents of the Aqua pasteboard. The Aqua pasteboard adds to the kill ring and gets the last entry of the kill ring, at least in the XEmacs I have here.

The example of XEmacs leads me to believe that this discussion is somewhat upside down:

What X11 has and Aqua hasn't is *not* a rule "select is copy". Select is select in both cases. And you can select a lot more than just text.

What X11 has and Aqua doesn't is that middle-click runs "paste primary selection", *without* passing by a separate copy command. This would be something very useful to have in Aqua too.

But then dreaming on in the same direction, the following would be extremely useful to have in Aqua, too:

1. An equivalent of XEmacs' ctrl-select, namely select without displacing the focus or cursor, and immediately pasting the result at the current cursor position. This is the one property that kept me using XEmacs even on MacOSX for years. You don't get this in other X11 apps either, AFAIK.

2. Something similar to emacs' kill ring, namely a history of most recent pasteboard contents. Maybe configurable like the other "Recent items" lists.

If Aqua had these three operations, then the synchronization with X11 would be very simple: Primary selection == primary selection, and clipboard == pasteboard.

--
Martin



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References: 
 >Re: copy and paste between Aqua and X11 applications? (From: Vernon Williams <email@hidden>)
 >Re: copy and paste between Aqua and X11 applications? (From: Vincent Lefevre <email@hidden>)
 >Re: copy and paste between Aqua and X11 applications? (From: Rich Cook <email@hidden>)
 >Re: copy and paste between Aqua and X11 applications? (From: Vincent Lefevre <email@hidden>)
 >Re: copy and paste between Aqua and X11 applications? (From: Rich Cook <email@hidden>)
 >Re: copy and paste between Aqua and X11 applications? (From: Ben Byer <email@hidden>)
 >Re: copy and paste between Aqua and X11 applications? (From: Bill Campbell <email@hidden>)
 >Re: copy and paste between Aqua and X11 applications? (From: "Adam D. I. Kramer" <email@hidden>)
 >Re: copy and paste between Aqua and X11 applications? (From: Ben Byer <email@hidden>)



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