Re: select-active-regions

[David De La Harpe Golden]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> It's analogous in the sense that killing puts text there and yanking
> gets text from there.


When killing, emacs on X11 places text in
primary if x-select-enable-primary is t
clipboard if x-select-enable-clipboard is t

When yanking, emacs on x11 gets text from
primary if x-select-enable-primary is t
clipboard if x-select-enable-clipboard is t

(They could maybe be decoupled into incoming and outgoing settings, but 
that's another story...)

So on X11, I:
set x-select-enable-primary to nil
set x-select-enable-clipboard to t
set select-active-regions to t, so that the active region is sent to 
primary.

Now, not all x11 emacs users like that convention, but that's why x11 
emacs supports several. I can set things to my liking as above, and all 
without screwing up things for other emacs users.

I don't see why, if for some reason I was using msdos/w16 or w32 emacs 
(not especially likely for me personally, yay for windows' near total 
lack of penetration into HPC, but anyway), the native port there 
shouldn't be able to emulate the convention I like as best it can.

i.e. If I'm used to select-active-regions working without clobbering the 
clipboard on X11, why the holy hell should it clobber the clipboard on 
Windows? Presumably only self-self primary interactions will work on 
Windows since emacs emulates primary internally, but they do constitute 
a distinctly nonzero proportion of my primary interactions.


> Anyway, do you think it is better to have this feature effectively
> disabled on Windows, than copy into the clipboard?

You've missed the option of having it work as on x11 for emacs-emacs 
interactions (that is _not_ "effectively disabled") but not copying to 
the clipboard.  I don't know why, other than the possibility you've 
misunderstood some or all of X11 clipboard, X11 primary, or the purpose 
of select-active-regions.

I'm not sure if emacs w32 works under wine, but if it does I can try to 
look at:

(a) making it customizable whether select-active-regions hits the 
clipboard and/or primary (already sent a patch that does that...)

(b) look at using an idle timer hack or something on w32 to make it in 
fact work right all if told to hit the w32 clipboard (I presently think 
it will break or at best correspond to pre-bug-#902-fix incorrect 
behaviour without attention there). (not quite trivial)

(c) do so in a manner that _doesn't_ preclude w32's primary emulation 
being improved in future.