Re: Clipboard and Drag and Drop.

[Alexandre Owen Muniz <munizao cyberhighway net>]

Svanberg Liss wrote:

> Ok. I was writing a clipboard for gnome with a lot of enchantments, but has
> now abrandoned the project because I have found out that X itself allready
> has got a clipboard that is powerful enough.
> 
> The X-clipboard works basically the same way as X-DnD. You declare what you
> want to put in the clipboard ( you may declare more than one type of data ).
> Whenever another application want's to paste, your app will be notifyed
> about this. From what I remember, you allso have the possibility to store
> data drectly in the clipboard ( that will remain if your app shuts down ).
> 

But... (AFAICT) it is stored in a buffer in the x server, which means
that the clipboard cannot persist between x sessions or be used outside
of x. It would be nice to have the option to use clipboards that have
been saved to a file. 

Also, you cannot store arbitrary metadata about the contents of a
clipboard, and while it is possible to have multiple clipboard buffers,
there is no standard way of keeping track of those buffers. I think that
a gconf based system for keeping track of clipboards would be useful for
both of these purposes. I posted before on some possibilities for using
clipboards with some types of metadata beyond what is available with x
selections. Note that this system could use both x selections and file
based clipboards as backends in a manner transparent to applications
using them by saving the kind of clipboard in the clipboard metadata.



> The main problem with the X-clipboard is that it is called "selection", so
> nobody appears to understand what it is.
> 
> Oh, and, the second problem is that there is allmost none documentation
> about this...
> 
> Gtk+ has got a wrapper around this (GtkSelection) , as it allso have for the
> DnD.
> gtkDnD is compatible with older applications, and I believe that
> gtkselection is compatible as well, allthough I have not tested this ( I
> became a bit "tired" when I realized that I had worked for over half a year
> with something completely needless :(
> 
> So I guess that the only help needed is DOCUMENTATION, where you clearly can
> read about the selection mechanism togeather with drag-and-drop, and where
> it's absolutely clear that selcetion is the X'equiallence of M$ clipboard...
> 

I have nothing against x selections, but I think more can be done on top
of and around what already exists.

**Ali Owen Muņiz