Re: emacs24 X primary selection changes

[Bob Proulx]

Jason Rumney wrote:
> Bob Proulx  wrote:
> > Because maybe Firefox and Chromium are both using the primary
> > selection instead of the clipboard for compatibilty but if they were
> > configured differently then perhaps it would work?  Don't know.
> 
> Firefox and Chromium are doing the same as what Emacs 24 now does by
> default.
> If you select something with the mouse, it becomes the primary
> selection.

Right.  So Firefox and Chromium are using the primary selection by
default.  No change.  Sounds good.

> If you press C-c, or select Copy from the menu, then it
> also gets put on the clipboard.

Oh, so if you take the additional action after highlighting some text
of typing in the keys C-c or the menu copy action then with that
additional explicit action it goes to the clipboard instead of the
primary selection.  Or perhaps in addition to the primary selection
because it went there first when it was highlighted.  Gotcha!

So if I had highlighted something and then added C-c to push it into
the clipboard and then yanked that into emacs I would have seen the
text in emacs.

I would never have expected that!  And I would have tried it if I had
thought of it.

But of course there isn't a way to cause that difference with a xterm
which is where I mostly cut text from.  So while that works with the X
browsers it doesn't work with a text terminal.  (I know that some text
terminals add mouse menus that doing that would add a lot of mouse
clicks and would be tedious to do very many very fast.)

> If you want to insert the primary selection into the URL bar or a
> text field on a form in Firefox or Chrome, you need to use the
> mouse.

Right.  But that is long standing normal behavior.  Drag mouse-1 and
it copies text where it can then be pasted from.  That is the way that
it has always worked on X Windows.  That is what everyone coming from
an X Windows background expects.  But the words of your response read
as if that would be abnormal.  But that isn't abnormal.  It is normal.

(I realize that people coming from an MS Windows background expects
something different and that I am outnumbered by the huge number of
the newcomers.  But I still resist because the paradigm isn't as nice.)

> If you use C-v, or Paste from the menu, then it will insert
> from the clipboard.

Gotcha.  Keys use the clipboard in the new MS-Windows way to do things.

> Actually cut buffers and the primary selection are not the same
> thing. Cut buffers are an older method of transferring text between
> applications, which have been obsolete for decades, and for which
> support was removed in Emacs 24. The primary selection is what you are
> used to using.

The naming is a little confusing.  And as I said I found the wrong
section by poor use of keywords while searching.  I can't believe I
missed the section immediately above the one I found.  Thank you for
educating me that the cut buffers referred to something yet
different.  That is useful to know to interpret that entry.

Bob