bug#34014: 25.2; binding down mouse event with modifier to mouse-drag-region does not work

[Adolf Mathias]

Ah yes, track-mouse is almost  what I need, as I said I wrote my
replacement for mouse-drag-track, but the double and triple click
behaviour is tricky in its own right, with all those timeouts and
motion bounds to keep in mind when pursuing the multiple-click
hypothesis, and mouse-drag-track did that all perfectly until Emacs
25, yada yada yada.... A bit frustrating.

Sorry :) Let's try to come to a constructive conclusion. By the way,
Emacs is a great piece of software, and I am slightly ashamed that I
did not contribute to it, given that it is my editor of choice, and
given the numerous Emacs-Lisp goodies that I  use a lot daily, enabled
by Stallman's fabulous basic design.

On Sun, Aug 16, 2020 at 7:10 PM Stefan Kangas <stefan@marxist.se> wrote:
>
> Adolf Mathias <adolf.mathias@gmail.com> writes:
>
> > No, it doesn't. With emacs -Q, mouse-1 then mouse-3 does the same as
> > simply dragging out a region. Clicking mouse-3 at the same spot, the
> > region gets killed, otherwise readjusted.
> > With (setq mouse-drag-copy-region t), the region also gets copied to
> > the kill ring, otherwise it just disappears.
> >
> > Assume the text cursor is at position A. I want the region from B to C
> > copied to the text cursor position, and then continue editing right
> > behind the copied text.
> >
> > 1. Workflow with mouse-stay-and-copy bound to S-mouse-1:
> > press S-mouse-1 at B, release mouse-1 at C.
> >
> > 2. Workflow with mouse-copy-then-kill and (setq mouse-drag-copy-region t):
> > click mouse-1 at B, click mouse-3 at C, click mouse-1 at A, hit Ctrl-Y.
> >
> > 3. Workflow with standard dragged region:
> > drag out region from B to C. Hit Ctrl-W. Click mouse-1 at A. Hit Ctrl-Y.
> >
> > Workflow 1 saves me one or two mouse clicks and a keystroke and the
> > navigation back to A. It is that navigation back to A that bothers me
> > most - the dexterity issue, you know.
>
> Thank you for the detailed explanation.
>
> Perhaps the easiest would be to expand `mouse-drag-copy-region' et al.
> to optionally support the behavior you are describing?  I'm sure we
> would consider a patch to Emacs along those lines.
>
> Best regards,
> Stefan Kangas