[Annoyances] X-Windows Copy & Paste

[Thomas Leonard]

On Thu, Aug 21, 2003 at 03:35:54PM +0100, Mike Hearn wrote:
> On Thu, 2003-08-21 at 15:19, Thomas Leonard wrote:
> > 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)
> 
> Well, for files I actually was thinking of URIs. For instance if you
> drag a file from nautilus and konqueror, you get different URIs.

I think that's been discussed here before, and there way some agreement to
fix them (with Debian/unstable, nautilus currently gives file:///path and
konq gives file:/path). However, the solution is to change both of them to
actually follow the existing spec, not to create a new one.

[...]
> I sometimes wonder if a better approach would not be to use drag and
> drop more, so rather than copy/paste you drag pieces of text, images,
> files etc to a space on the panel (think something like the MacOS dock
> which scales the icons as you drop things in). That applet would hold
> onto these bits of data, transparently save them so they are there when
> you next log in, allow you to view what's in the clipboard etc. Dragging
> them out again copies them, dragging them to the trash can deletes them?

In ROX, we call this 'saving', 'loading' and 'deleting' a file, but the UI
is as you describe (s/applet/directory). You can even give them names, and
organise them into subdirectories ;-)

Unifying DND with the clipboard would be a good long-term goal. After all,
the clipboard is really just the accessibility interface to DnD (Ctrl-C =
press, Ctrl-V = release).


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