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

From: Stefan Monnier <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Aug 2010 09:29:59 +0200

>>> 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.
>> 
>> Indeed, I don't think it's good to do so.  The old behavior of setting
>> PRIMARY only when killing the text seems like the right behavior.
>> Why would we want to change that?

> Because it would conflict with
> http://standards.freedesktop.org/clipboards-spec/clipboards-latest.txt, and
> most other X applications set PRIMARY without an explicit kill or copy.

That doesn't mean that C-SPC C-f should set PRIMARY.  It just means that
some other operations should be considered as forms of copy/kill.

> And because it is convinient to be able to select text and then paste
> with middle button in another application.

Indeed, and Emacs-23 does that fine by saying that mouse-selection
performs a `copy'.

        Stefan