Miles Bader writes:
> Why not turn it on by default then?
XEmacs avoids it in the case of Motif (probably not relevant?) because
the Motif clipboard ownership protocol involves an insane number of
roundtrips if implemented properly, and is noticeably slow over even a
megabit connection due to latency.
There are also some cases for Xt over the network where use of the
clipboard can be very slow. These are rarer, but the demand for
clipboard-style interaction has never been very high, except on
Windows where it is the default anyway.
So yes, even in a modern network environment clipboard interaction can
be slow. However, if there's any demand for that style of
interaction, it may be worth making clipboard interaction the default
and telling users who are in environments where they perceive the
interaction to be slow to turn it off.