Re: Back to copy/paste.
Re: Back to copy/paste.
- Subject: Re: Back to copy/paste.
- From: Doug McNutt <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 20 Apr 2008 12:47:14 -0600
This exchange occurred:
> I'm sure you mean 'hilight, then edit->copy' here... just hilighting should not cause it to move to the pasteboard.
>
>No, I did mean highlight by itself. I have 'XTerm*VT100*selectToClipboard: true' in my ~/.Xresources (as stated).
When I first installed OS 10.1 I had in hand the programming manuals for the Next operating system and soon became quite confused by the names "clipboard" and "pasteboard". Lots of time with Apple's developer tools documentation didn't help much.
The Next books clearly state that the pasteboard is the selected stuff in an application without regard to whether or not it has been "copied". The tools pbcopy and pbpaste though have nothing to do with the pasteboard and work through the system level clipboard. The impression I got is that the pasteboard is a concept that exists only within a single process.
Back when I understood Macintosh software there was a scrap manager which handled the clipboard. Applications of any size maintained their own internal scrap areas - never called pasteboards - which often contained not copied data but rather a pointer to its memory space. The rule was that "copied" data had to be passed to the scrap manager when a release to another process occurred. It was a cooperatively shared system back then and the transfer could take place before a wait_next_event call was made. The scrap manager expected the data to be presented in a plurality of scrap types that were identified by four character names similar to the file types used in FREF resources. Another process then had the option of working with whatever form it could use on the clipboard. TEXT and PICT were the early types commonly used.
Now I remain all confused and this discussion just adds to my state. But I do think that clear definitions of some language, by Apple, would help.
"desk scrap", "clipboard", "pasteboard", "pb", "local scrap", "scrap type", . . . .
With process switching on demand it's a real problem to get system level clipboards updated when a process switch occurs. Even just TEXT would require an entry to the running process for the purpose. A white paper - from Apple - explaining the procedure would help and maybe there is such a thing. I'd read a link if I could find one.
--
Applescript syntax is like English spelling:
Roughly, though not thoroughly, thought through.
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