[Annoyances] X-Windows Copy & Paste

[Jody Goldberg]

On Thu, Aug 21, 2003 at 07:22:23PM +0200, Lubos Lunak wrote:
> On Thursday 21 of August 2003 16:35, Mike Hearn wrote:
> >
> > - The brokenness we already covered WRT non-text
> > - The fact that it works differently to windows in terms of persistance
> 
>  Can be fixed e.g. by using Klipper (or whichever xclipboard-like tool), at 
> the expense of some X bandwith (which would be there anyway, for any kind of 
> making it persistent). When the bandwith available is low, it can be however 
> easily fixed by not running Klipper.

Klipper is not a good, or in IMHO a viable, solution when content
get more complex.  There are two major failings

    - Format negotiation is impossible, or at least very very
      expensive.  Someone selects a range in Gnumeric (a
      spreadsheet) pasting that into OO produces a different format
      than pasting into an xterm, or into mozilla.  Having Klipper
      slurp it up in 1 format is broken, and trying to do it for all
      formats gets expensive fast.

    - Klipper's 'enthusiastic' approach to slurping the selection is
      lethal for large amounts of data.  When someone does a select
      all in a worksheet, with the intention of pasting it into
      another sheet in Gnumeric we can do things quickly.  To
      transfer that over the wire to klipper even in 1 format is
      a huge amount of data.

The notion of a central clipboard handler for apps that close seems
nice, but I'd rather see it hooked on as part of the session
management.  Where an app that is closing notices that its holding
the selection and passes it over to the server before exiting.