Re: clipboard again (was Re: Gnumeric and RHEL3)

[Nick Lamb <njl98r ecs soton ac uk>]

On Wed, Jul 14, 2004 at 03:12:48PM -0400, Morten Welinder wrote:
> There are no points for *talking* about fixing xterm.  You need to do
> it and then sit down and wait for deployment.

To achieve what you seem to want is pretty simple, just add the following
one-liner to your VT100 translations in the X resource database, you should
be able to find more detailed instructions in the manual.

<BtnUp>:select-end(CLIPBOARD, PRIMARY)

 [untested, but should work, let me know by private mail if you have trouble]

Note that this isn't a recommended fix or even a workaround, since there's
no reason for an ordinary user (ie not you) to expect xterm selections to
overwrite the clipboard. The end result is that xterm develops the same bug
as X-Chat, and as several unfortunate (and much complained about) KDE apps.

> Now with my code, on the other hand:
>
>                gnm_app_prefs->prefer_clipboard_selection
>                ? GDK_SELECTION_CLIPBOARD
>                : GDK_SELECTION_PRIMARY);
>
> things actually work as expected on my desktop.  (Featuring mozilla,
> Emacs, xterm, and gnumeric.)  If it is inconsistent, I have yet to
> see and suffer it.

The behaviour of the Edit/Paste (which activates the text importer) will
then be different from that of Ctrl-V and the associated context menu item
in any entry widgets for example. In one place it will paste the last
selected text (perhaps from your xterm) and in other places it will paste
the contents of the clipboard.

That seems inconsistent to me, but you'll almost certainly reply that you
don't notice little things like that, which I think was precisely the
reason why you're not best qualified to make this kind of decision.

> There are a gazillion people out there using xterm.  Outside the Linux
> world, it's more or less what you have.  Not being able to interoperate
> using cut-and-paste (in "man xterm" terms) is just plain arrogant.

Fixing the mistake in the wrong place helps no-one. I seem to remember
suggesting that Gnumeric didn't seem to use the middle mouse button for
anything on empty cells at least, and that seemed an appropriate place
to put a paste-PRIMARY feature, since some people seem to want one. I
don't know whether Jody would accept a patch to do that, or whether I
might be mistaken about the unused status of MMB click in Gnumeric.

Nick.