improve PRIMARY buffer copy-paste behaviour, paste over

Johannes Thrän johannes.thraen at gmail.com
Thu Mar 5 20:24:06 UTC 2020


Hi,

I'd like to spark a little improvement to the 'standard' regarding PRIMARY
buffer copy-paste behaviour (aka middle mouse button paste, aka selection
buffer).

One of the reasons why many consider middle mouse paste useless is, that
one can't replace currently selected text with middle mouse paste.
This could be possible though, if we'd sharpen (not change) the recommended
behaviour like this:
 - the PRIMARY buffer is only updated on left button up events
 - a text selection is replaced by the contents of the PRIMARY buffer when
a middle click is registered within it

To 'paste over' a text selection, one would have to: mark, hold click left
mouse, middle click.

I know that sounds awkward and middle mouse paste is considered legacy by
many. But still many use it, it was ported to wayland. We can as well try
to make the behaviour more useful.
I propose above concretization to the de facto copy-paste standard found
here:

https://specifications.freedesktop.org/clipboards-spec/clipboards-latest.txt

I tried said 'paste over' maneuver in a few common applications. Almost all
of them behaved differently :). So no silently agreed upon behaviour would
be broken.
If these changes make it to the document, I try to help implementing it in
some widgets.

What do you think?
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/attachments/20200305/59f7a223/attachment.htm>


More information about the xdg mailing list