[Annoyances] X-Windows Copy & Paste

[Thomas Leonard]

On Thu, Aug 21, 2003 at 02:57:58PM +0100, Mike Hearn wrote:
> On Thu, 2003-08-21 at 14:20, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > The problem that does need solving is persistence of clipboard after
> > an app exits, ideally without harvesting a selection and freezing its
> > format immediately.
> 
> Don't forget things like the fact that we can only copy and paste text
> reliably. IIRC there is no standard format for images, or files.

Why not just use the MIME types, as we do for drag-and-drop (which works
just like the clipboard anyway)?
(image/png, application/octet-stream for your examples)

> It might be worth considering (timidly) dropping X selections for the
> clipboard entirely at some point, and moving to an separate system that
> works how you might expect off the bat, and is capable of doing all the
> whizzy types people expect, doesn't suffer wierd problems with >64k of
> data etc.

What wierd problems? Don't the toolkits deal with this for us?

The only problem with the clipboard, as I understand it, is that if you
quit the application then you lose the clipboard. But that's not a
technical issue... it's just that we genuinely don't know if the user's
going to use the clipboard again. We could easily prevent an application
from quitting while it owns the clipboard if we wanted.


-- 
Thomas Leonard			http://rox.sourceforge.net
tal00r at ecs.soton.ac.uk	tal197 at users.sourceforge.net
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