Re: The X window system, yanking, and pasting using the mouse

[David De La Harpe Golden]

On 27/01/11 02:31, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> Hi,
>
>          I have read the archives of this mailing list, and the release
>   notes of the latest release candidate, and I am left somewhat
>   confused. I am using the latest Emacs from Git.
>
> This is what I have:
> --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
> (setq
>    transient-mark-mode   t                  ;show the marked region
>    ;;; Behave like other X applications. This is confusing.
>    x-select-enable-primary   t
>    x-select-enable-clipboard t   ;;; cut/paste use clipboard
>    select-active-regions 'only   ;;; temporarily active regions set the
>                                  ;;; window selection.
>    mouse-drag-copy-region t      ;;; copy dragged region to kill ring
>   )


*** It is necessary to bind mouse-2 to mouse-yank-at-click to restore 
old behaviour.  It is NOT PRESENTLY POSSIBLE to restore historical
emacs behaviour without a rebinding as well as customisation.

That is not to say it /shouldn't/ be possible to use solely 
customisation to restore the historical behaviour - I have recommended 
mouse-2 be bound back to mouse-yank-at-click, and mouse-yank-at-click 
then expanded to support both the standards-compliant and historical 
emacs behaviour, depending on a customisation.  Third party code and 
other binding sites (e.g. the fringes) also make this approach 
preferable IMNHO.

All recent discussions of the matter on emacs-devel have convinced me 
that users /do not cope with rebinding/, even when directly told they 
need to rebind some of them simply refuse to do so. Possibly that's only 
because there's no GUI for keybinding reconfiguration,
but that would be a large project compared to just reverting the mouse-2 
binding and introducing the relevant boolean customisation.

First place in your ~/.emacs:

(global-set-key [mouse-2] 'mouse-yank-at-click)

Then do:

mouse-drag-copy-region t
select-active-regions nil
x-select-enable-primary t
x-select-enable-clipboard nil


I also acknowledge the customisations are confusing.  I still do not see 
a way to make a saner scheme without breaking some source-code backward 
compatibility (n.b. a saner scheme should be possible with "user visible 
behaviour" backward compatibility.)