Subject: bug#6774: Cut and paste with C-w/mouse-2 not working?

From: David De La Harpe Golden <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 06 Aug 2010 22:05:25 +0100

On 06/08/10 16:28, Chong Yidong wrote:

> The main question in my mind is this: for active
> regions made with C-SPC, as opposed to shift-selection or mouse
> dragging, do we want mere cursor motion to update the selection?  (There
> is nothing analogous in other programs.)
>
> I think the best answer is no.

Well, select-active-regions was introduced (though not made default) 
rather before the ^-type shift-selection appeared AFAIK.  From my 
perspective, it would be breaking something that was largely working as 
initially intended and (unlike with the general defaults change) not 
giving the option of having it work the way it did* anymore (well, apart 
from patching it in locally, I'm hardly incapable of doing that).

If you do choose to go that route, at least consider making c-spc active 
regions and shift/mouse active regions visually distinct, so the 
differing selection behaviour is less surprising (not how the secondary 
selection is presented in a different color in emacs, for example) - I 
mean, that was historically an annoyance with mouse selection, its 
interaction with x11 selection and the kill-ring was significantly 
different to keyboard selection, despite the similar presentation.

* or at least, as it did, only with several now-known outstanding issues 
fixed, of course.