On Thursday 11 April 2002 02:46 pm, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
> On Thu, 11 Apr 2002, Ned Konz wrote:
> > Bert suggested making clipboard text *from* Squeak be available
> > as both PRIMARY and CLIPBOARD, and copying only the PRIMARY *to*
> > Squeak.
> >
> > Since this seemed reasonable to me, I did it.
>
> Great! I committed that to SF.

Unfortunately, it still doesn't do the right thing. Perhaps others 
have an idea.

The problem is that it is possible to put something in the CLIPBOARD 
that was never in PRIMARY. For instance, I can right-button your name 
in my mail reader and choose "copy to clipboard". Or I can copy a URL 
from my browser. In neither case does PRIMARY get touched; only 
CLIPBOARD gets set.

Alas, unless Squeak owned the CLIPBOARD selection, it never gets 
notified that the selection there has changed (and that happens only 
indirectly through a SelectionClear event).

Likewise, we can't tell how fresh the selections are. We can query for 
owners of the CLIPBOARD and/or PRIMARY, but then we'd have to prefer 
one over the other (perhaps CLIPBOARD) if they were both set. The 
problem with this is that if you had a prior CLIPBOARD set from 
another app that wasn't from a selection you'd always get it until 
you copied from Squeak.

Or we could get both selections, compare them, and append them if they 
weren't the same (but this could be a mess).

I could see making a commandline switch to specify which selection is 
preferred; in my system there is little use for PRIMARY any more.

Interestingly, in the Konsole terminal program, it seems to do an 
automatic copy to CLIPBOARD when you make a selection. Though this is 
ugly, it works with the rest of KDE/Qt3.0.

-- 
Ned Konz
http://bike-nomad.com
GPG key ID: BEEA7EFE