Re: emacs -nw: share mouse cut & pastes from other X windows

[David desJardins]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@is.elta.co.il> writes:
> I believe this interaction works as it does now because most X users
> expect the selections to work in Emacs as they do in other X
> applications, and because we don't want users to reach for the mouse
> when they type in Emacs.

You could easily accomplish just that, with an Emacs keyboard binding
that copies the top of the kill-ring to the cut buffer.  (And maybe
another key that cycles through the kill ring while copying to the cut
buffer, like the C-y/M-y pair.)  And mouse-dragging to select a region
could still copy it to the cut buffer, as it does now.

But Emacs does much, much more.  When I type C-k, I'm not "selecting"
anything.  This certainly isn't a request to deselect whatever I have
carefully put in the cut buffer.  But that's what Emacs does.

If the kill ring is going to be re-interpreted as "a history of
everything the user has ever selected", so that by definition anything
that is killed is "selected", then why doesn't Emacs put everything
that's ever selected in a non-Emacs application, into the kill ring?
That would be the annoying analogue to the current annoying behaviour of
Emacs kills.

                                        David desJardins.