[Usability]Re: clipboard manager comments

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

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.

If we don't want any UI there, then we could just glom it in to
gnome-panel or gnome-settings-daemon or something.

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."

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.

Whether this is worth the clutter of a panel applet I don't know.

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.

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.

Havoc