Subject: Re: bug#13790: Cannot paste with C-y into Homebrew emacs v24.2.1

From: Josh <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 13 Mar 2013 09:18:08 -0700

On Fri, Mar 8, 2013 at 5:42 PM, Stefan Monnier <[email-masked]> wrote:
>> By default, yes, but this is the precise reason
>> interprogram-cut-function and interprogram-paste-function exist.
>> pbcopy and pbpaste are the OS X equivalents of xclip, and the snippet
>> I pasted provides an interface to them like the interface to xclip
>> provided by http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/xclip.el .  Many users are
>> unaware of the existence of these variables, which results in
>> confusion and the filing of bugs such as this.  Users would be more
>> likely to discover them if the error messages complaining about an
>> empty kill ring in -nw sessions were to mention their existence.
>
> Indeed.  Maybe your patch should be merged with xclip.el?

I'd be happy to contribute it, though it's merely a slight
modification of a snippet I found on the web years ago, most probably
http://web.archive.org/web/20071128072321/http://blog.lathi.net/articles/2007/11/07/sharing-the-mac-clipboard-with-emacs
.  Is this code trivial enough that we needn't be concerned about
copyright issues?

Also, I see that xclip.el resides in the GNU ELPA repository.  Since
it's likely that many people using Emacs in -nw mode would like to
integrate Emacs kill and yank operations with their operating systems'
clipboards, I wonder if it would be worthwhile for some or all of
xclip.el's functionality to move into the core.  We could do this by
including a few simple wrapper functions such as the above to provide
interfaces to xclip, pbcopy/pbpaste, and whatever Windows equivalent
may exist, and mentioning those functions' existence in
interprogram-cut-function's and interprogram-paste-function's
docstrings.