Subject: bug#1765: Copy/paste inconsistent with other X apps

From: "Ole Laursen" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 5 Jan 2009 13:52:17 +0100

2009/1/4 Richard M Stallman <[email-masked]>:
>    However, my Emacs 22.2.1 (started with emacs -Q) is confusing the two.
>    If I kill-ring-save "foo", select "bar" with the mouse and yank I get
>    "bar" instead of "foo". With the above spec, I should have gotten
>    "bar" only if I pressed M-w before yanking.
>
> This is a very useful feature.  It means, for instance, that you can use
> C-y in Emacs to insert text that was selected in other apps.

But the thing is that this goes against the defacto standard - and it
is there for good reasons. Standard paste/yank always only inserts
text that was explicitly copied to the clipboard. If you read this
short document

  http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/ClipboardsWiki

it's very clear on this.

The problem with not following the spec is that text selections are
used for a lot of stuff. If I patiently select a piece of text with
the mouse and press C-c, I expect to be able use that piece of text
later - even if I have selected another piece of text, or just clicked
an input field with automatic text selection.

Imagine having the kill ring filled up with random stuff every time
you press C-space and move the cursor. That's what Emacs is currently
doing with clips from other programs.

-- 
Ole Laursen
http://people.iola.dk/olau/