bug#12750: Highlighting text no longer works

[Bruce Korb]

Hi Eli,

Thank you.

On Sun, Oct 28, 2012 at 9:47 AM, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
>
> Actually, it's a feature: it was deemed a Good Thing to behave like
> the other GUI applications.
[...]
> See this entry in NEWS (what you want, if you still do, is at the
> end):

It is quite inconvenient to switch stuff like this without more readily
apparent announcements.  Folks like me do not ever deliberately
update things, so we don't go reading "NEWS" of the 100+ things
that get updated automatically.

>   ** Selection changes.
>
>   The default handling of clipboard and primary selections has been
>   changed to conform with modern X applications.  In short, most
>   commands for killing and yanking text now use the clipboard, while
>   mouse commands use the primary selection.

Sounds like the mouse ought to be using the clipboard to me.
Using separate mechanisms is clumsy.  This may explain why
I have so much difficulty pasting stuff into a Chrome buffer.
I think they must have it confused and wrong, too.
Seems to work okay in Firefox.  For Chrome, I often must go figure out
where in heck the "edit"->"select" thingy is and go through that menu
operation in order to be able to paste my text.

The separation was not well considered.  (expletives elided.)

>   In the following, we provide a list of these changes, followed by a
>   list of steps to get the old behavior back if you prefer that.

The "modern" approach is brain damaged, so, yes, I prefer it.

>   *** To return to the previous behavior, do the following:
>
>   **** Change `select-active-regions' to nil.
>   **** Change `mouse-drag-copy-region' to t.
>   **** Change `x-select-enable-primary' to t (on X only).
>   **** Change `x-select-enable-clipboard' to nil.
>   **** Bind `mouse-yank-at-click' to mouse-2.

It is really helpful to have explicit instructions:

*** To return to the previous behavior, add the following to your .emacs file:
    (setq select-active-regions         nil)
    (setq mouse-drag-copy-region        't)
    (setq x-select-enable-primary       't)
    (setq x-select-enable-clipboard     nil)
    (global-set-key [mouse-2]          'mouse-yank-at-click)