Re: [Texmacs-dev] Patches: copy/paste and selection handling.

[Norbert Nemec]

Hmm - I never considered the mouse-middle-button as "evil". Maybe it is 
not as useful as it could be in the current definition of the standard.

Joris van der Hoeven wrote:
> The "standard" middle-click behaviour (also implemented in Emacs)
> is evil in many ways and especially in the context of TeXmacs:
>   1) The cursor position where you paste is not indicated when pasting.
>   
Some editors offer something like a "phantom-cursor" that moves along 
with the mouse cursor as a gray "shadow" to indicate the place where the 
cursor would be placed on a left-click. This would also help greatly for 
a middle click. Of course, this would mean major surgery in TeXmacs. 
Otherwise, however, I do not see how you would want to improve the 
situation here.

>   2) This could be fixed by displaying a cursor on mouse press, but this is
>      still not nice: as soon as you click, you are obliged to paste,
>      even if you are unable to position at the correct position by mouse.
>      This lack of robustness bad independently from 1).
>   
>   3) Impossible to paste at certain logical positions which correspond
>      to the same graphical positions (TeXmacs specific, does not occur in 
> Emacs).
>   
OK, the impossibilty to paste certain content in certain positions is 
specific to TeXmacs. I don't see, however, why this makes the 
middle-click evil. On middle click, the cursor is first positioned just 
like with the left-click and then the content it attempted to be pasted. 
If this is impossible, it is simply not done and the middle-click simply 
has the same effect as a left-click.
> So there are many motivations behind the original behaviour of
> the middle mouse click. But well, if it is not standard...
> The new implementation will just make middle mouse clicking
> useless for myself.
>   
Maybe the following idea would help:

How about making Shift-middle-click perform a mouse-paste without cursor 
repositioning? You could then first place the cursor exactly where you 
want and shift-middle-click anywhere in the TeXmacs-window to paste to 
this position.

I don't think that this violates any standards. It even follows the 
behavior of text-mode editors run in a xterm/konsole window. Personally, 
I would really appreciate this feature.

> Now we are talking about copy and paste, I also got a request
> for better CJK support. I will send a sample file which demonstrates
> how it should work. If someone wants to take a look...
>   
I think, this falls into the much broader category of content 
translation at copy-paste. The standard actually allows quite a bit of 
intelligence that we do not use so far. I have not really touched this, 
yet, with my work. I don't want to promise anything on that soon.

Greetings,
Norbert