GNU bug report logs - #1765
Copy/paste inconsistent with other X apps

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Message #5 received at submit <at> emacsbugs.donarmstrong.com (full text, mbox):

From: "Ole Laursen" <olau <at> hardworking.dk>
To: bug-gnu-emacs <at> gnu.org
Cc: olau <at> hardworking.dk
Subject: Copy/paste inconsistent with other X apps
Date: Fri, 2 Jan 2009 16:41:46 +0100

Hi!

In every other recent X app I have tried, copy/pasting works the way
that the mouse selection = copy and middle click = paste is seperate
from the C-c/C-v clipboard. This fits in with the description here:

  http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/ClipboardsWiki
  http://www.jwz.org/doc/x-cut-and-paste.html

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 mostly annoying when pasting from another program, e.g. using
C-c to copy "foo" in the browser, then yanking the text in Emacs. If
you accidentally click the wrong place, the effort in selecting "foo"
is lost.

I think it makes sense to change the Emacs behaviour to make it a good
citizen in the free desktop. And it's arguably also more likely to
prevent loss of clips.

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

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