Re: Back to copy/paste.
Re: Back to copy/paste.
- Subject: Re: Back to copy/paste.
- From: Ben Byer <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2008 12:25:01 -0700
Far be it from me to come to the defense of our sucky cut'n'paste
handling, but I must pick a nit or two, because it's actually relevant:
On Apr 15, 2008, at 11:16 AM, Adam D. I. Kramer wrote:
The basic issue is that currently, the text has to remain selected
in X11
when you PASTE the text into a non-X11 app. This is inconsistent
with other
Mac behavior (when you hit copy, it copies and you can paste
whenever unless
you copy something else)
The fundamental problem here is an impedance mismatch between X11 and
Cocoa. In X11, when you "copy" something, it actually just stores a
"promise" -- a pointer to that data. The data isn't actually pushed
anywhere until you paste, which causes data to be pulled from the
first app. See e.g. http://www.jwz.org/doc/x-cut-and-paste.html for
more info on this.
On the other hand, in Cocoa, when you copy something, it copies all of
that data to the NSPasteboard, and when you paste, it just pulls the
data from the NSPasteboard.
and other X11 behavior (when you select something,
it is copied, and if deselected, you can still paste it until you
select
something else).
Are you sure about this? Specifically, note that there are two
different mechanisms inside of X11 for what we'd call copy and paste.
Primary selection: This is what is currently selected. If you middle-
click, it gets pasted -- which is to say if nothing is selected,
nothing will get pasted.
Clipboard: This is what data gets shoved into if you are in some
editor and use its Copy command.
This is actually part of the problem, because people have varying
expectations of what should happen in OS X when you hit paste in e.g.
TextEdit. Does it paste the contents of the primary selection, or of
the clipboard? Right now I think it tries to guess what you want --
if you have something selected, it'll paste that, otherwise it'll
paste the clipboard. However, this runs contrary to your expectations
(which are fair) -- do you have any ideas for a better way to handle
this?
-b
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