Re: [Usability]Re: clipboard manager comments

[Damien Covey <djcovey softhome net>]

Havoc Pennington wrote:
> djcovey softhome net writes: 
> > I tend to agree somewhat.  I just cant see the utility of a clipboard
> > manager, it should just work without such a 'tool'.
> >   
>
> Well, there are two things here. 
>
> For remembering clipped data after apps exit, we need a process
> running. An applet is probably the easiest approach to that - as
> applets are sort of "user-visible daemons" - if we want it to have any
> UI. So that is what gcm is.
Oh, I didnt realise that clipped data was not remembered after app exit already.
> If we don't want any UI there, then we could just glom it in to
> gnome-panel or gnome-settings-daemon or something.
Yeah, maybe.
> The second thing is whether to have the UI. I seem to remember seeing
> various apps with clipboard history - don't apps such as Photoshop
> have this? If we're going to have it in apps it may as well be
> "global."
I dont think that the UI needs to be visible the whole time.  Cant it be
called by an application on an as needed basis?
> The point isn't to view the current clipboard contents really, though
> that seems harmless and even helpful for understanding cut-and-paste,
> but to be able to get back to old clipboard contents.
I didnt think of this, but yeah, I agree that it would be good to be able
to look through the clipboard's history.
> Whether this is worth the clutter of a panel applet I don't know.

Well, I dont think so, this is one of the things that I did not like about
KDE when I was using it when I first came to Linux.
> Anyway, I think the "remembering clipped data" daemon is basically
> mandatory, we need to do something there. Whether to stick a UI on it
> is open to discussion.
I'd vote for no UI unless the application calls it.
> Maybe the "remember daemon" should actually be gnome-independent, so
> we can standardize the mechanism for extending the types it knows
> about. Then we could reasonably expect all apps, even non-GNOME apps,
> to register their types for handling. i.e. apps might register a
> vtable with methods like:
>
>  get_handled_targets
>  serialize_data_to_byte_array
>  convert_data_to_other_target
>
> However then it's probably a lot harder to implement the UI part.  Or
> at least involves making yet another copy of the data.
I dont know what technical difficulties this may pose, but I think it would
be bennificial to have it work accross Gnome/KDE etc.
> Havoc
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