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

From: Chong Yidong <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 08 Aug 2010 22:55:53 -0400

David De La Harpe Golden <[email-masked]> writes:

>> I added a new value to `select-active-regions', `lazy' (the default),
>> which means to set the selection only when used,
>
> Perhaps unsurprisingly, I found it near-instantly annoying. Is the
> primary motivation concern about out-of-box efficiency?  Otherwise I
> really don't get why it'd be desirable.

This approach is an effort to balance the expectations of other X
applications, old Emacs behavior, and implementation
simplicity/efficiency.

There's no analogue to the Emacs's ordinary (C-SPC) active regions in
other programs, and it's not even clear to me that it's good to set the
primary selection under most circumstances.  The original point of
transient mark mode is to let you mark out a stretch of text to to
operate on (e.g. comment, or search, or undo), and I don't know if it's
really correct for us to set the primary selection at the same time.

We can discuss the issue on emacs-devel, but first I'd like some time to
think, and to see how the present behavior works in practice.