Cut and paste behavior

[Marc Wilson]

On Mon, Oct 29, 2007 at 06:14:05PM +0900, John Summerfield wrote:
> Cut & paste on Linux is different from on OS/2 and Windows

Not significantly.

> and KDE is different from Gnome.

Yes, but not significantly as regards to cut and paste.

> And some apps insist on doing it the Windows way, and some both ways.

X has two mechanisms... selections, and the clipboard.  Selections
obviously only work while the application in which the selection occurs is
running, while the clipboard persists.

The usual freedesktop.org brokenness, which I believe Fedora/Gnome adopts,
is to make the PRIMARY selection step on CLIPBOARD.  I don't believe
freedesktop.org even acknowledges that SECONDARY exists any longer.

Highlighting with left mouse, then pasting with middle mouse, is NOT using
CLIPBOARD.  That's all the PRIMARY selection.  Putting stuff in CLIPBOARD
is an explicit act.  However, since X has been configured to duplicate
PRIMARY over CLIPBOARD, it means that it LOOKS the same.

Read http://www.jwz.org/doc/x-cut-and-paste.html for a good description of
how it actually works.

-- 
 Marc Wilson |
 msw at cox.net |