Re: Improving X selection?

[David De La Harpe Golden]

On 08/02/2008, Stefan Monnier <address@hidden> wrote:
> > Do you mean as a customization telling select-active-regions not to
> > use kill-ring-save but rather its own call to
> > interprogram-cut-function with the locally rebound
> > x-select-enable-clipboard*? Or telling kill-ring-save to not use the
> > kill ring (heh)?
>
> Not sure how I'd use it, I'd have to look more carefully at the code.
> But maybe it would be a simple var used for let-binding, and not
> a defcustom.
>
> > I still think an interprogram-select/insert-function is simpler.
> > Selection and insertion are plain different interprogram operations to
> > cut/copy and paste after all.  In fact, outside X11, they're not even
> > interprogram operations.
>
> I don't think you understand that interprogram-*-function are low-level
> variables used to dispatch to the appropriate backend (mac/X/w32/...).
>

I understand that. Trouble is, you seem to want to use interprogram-cut for
thigns that are not [supposed to be] cut/copy operations at the
backend/OS level and interprogram-paste for things that are not
[supposed to be] paste operations at the backend/OS level.

Look, if the operations aren't confused, it's easy enough to provide a
user preference to confuse them if they like the historic emacs
behaviours.  If they start off confused, it's difficult to impossible
to subsequently unconfuse them.

Calling (or considering the functions to be) really
interprogram-input-function and interprogram-output-function that take
parameters  or use locally rebound variables to indicate what sort of
input or output operation it really is could kind of work, but would
likely encourage just the sort of historic confusion it would be nice
to avoid in future (if emacs  fitting in with a freedesktop.org
desktop is a goal).