Re: On cut, copy, paste etc...

[David De La Harpe Golden]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> Okay, but what does all this have to do with the original issue?

How C-w and menu-bar->edit->cut differ : one sets the
primary selection, and the other the clipboard....

(well, actually depends on x-select-enable-primary/clipboard
customisation too)

>  You are asking for a different behavior of C-w;

In my own opinion, menu-bar cut should ultimately do the same as C-w,
but not before other changes are introduced so that people
can still separately set primary and clipboard _somewhow_.

> I'm saying that no matter
> how it behaves wrt the X selection and the clipboard, we could modify
> kill-region in small ways so that clipboard-kill-region would be
> unnecessary, and we then could bind kill-region to menu-bar>Edit>Cut.

BUT there are people who apparently prefer C-w setting PRIMARY (see last
thread...). They may then _like_ the menu being different, for when they
_do_ want to set CLIPBOARD. (similar for C-y and paste getting).

My patch allowed, for active region, keyboard, menu+toolbar and mouse
operations, separate configuration of which x selections were got/set
(and whether the kill-ring was involved sometimes).

Certainly, if there was a decision to have menu-bar cut always do the
same thing as C-w, that patch would have been a bit simpler, but it
would be noticeably incompatible with current X11 emacs, which at least
allows _some_ way of separately affecting primary and clipboard, even if
it is weird.