Re: [Texmacs-dev] Patches: copy/paste and selection handling.

[Joris van der Hoeven]

On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 08:35:34PM +0100, Norbert Nemec wrote:
> I just checked the changes that you put on top of my patches and I am 
> not sure whether I agree. The name "mouse" selection was chosen very 
> intentionally: As far as I understood the various documents and comments 
> on the web, the mouse-buffer on X-Windows should really work exclusively 
> for selections made with the mouse. A mouse-middle-click should just 
> paste the last mouse-selection, no matter what you did with the keyboard 
> in between. This is also the behavior that I observed in several other 
> applications, so at least on X-Windows this seems to be standard. Of 
> course, this means that the content of the mouse-buffer should be 
> preserved beyond the lifetime of the visible selection. If you select by 
> mouse and then move around with the keyboard or the scrollbars or even 
> click on the text to place the cursor (without dragging) the 
> mouse-buffer should still contain the content of the original selection 
> and paste it on middle-click.

OK, I reverted to your implementation.

> As for the imprecise positioning of the cursor on middle-click: This is 
> exactly what happens in any other editor as well. The positioning on 
> middle-click is just as sensitive to the exact mouse position as the 
> positioning on left-click. I don't quite understand why you worry about 
> this specifically. What is the connection to the removal of selections 
> on mouse click?

The "standard" middle-click behaviour (also implemented in Emacs)
is evil in many ways and especially in the context of TeXmacs:
  1) The cursor position where you paste is not indicated when pasting.
  2) This could be fixed by displaying a cursor on mouse press, but this is
     still not nice: as soon as you click, you are obliged to paste,
     even if you are unable to position at the correct position by mouse.
     This lack of robustness bad independently from 1).
  3) Impossible to paste at certain logical positions which correspond
     to the same graphical positions (TeXmacs specific, does not occur in 
Emacs).
So there are many motivations behind the original behaviour of
the middle mouse click. But well, if it is not standard...
The new implementation will just make middle mouse clicking
useless for myself.

Now we are talking about copy and paste, I also got a request
for better CJK support. I will send a sample file which demonstrates
how it should work. If someone wants to take a look...

Best wishes, Joris