improve PRIMARY buffer copy-paste behaviour, paste over

[Thiago Macieira]

On Thursday, 5 March 2020 12:24:06 PST Johannes Thrän wrote:
> 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.

You mean middle click while the left button is still held down? That 
effectively means dragging the text from source to destination. If DnD is 
working, you wouldn't need the middle click: the drop should be sufficient to 
get the text "pasted".

> What do you think?

I like the current behaviour in most applications[*]: mouse events update 
PRIMARY, keyboard and menu events update CLIPBOARD, except for the paste-
PRIMARY key combo. If I select text with Ctrl+A (Select All), PRIMARY stays 
unmodified. I can Ctrl+C to update the CLIPBOARD if I want to. Or I can 
middle-click or use Ctrl+Shift+Insert to paste PRIMARY over the selection.

[*] there are a couple of applications that for some reason misbehave. Firefox 
comes to mind; kwrite and krunner react to middle-click but not 
Ctrl+Shift+Insert.

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago (AT) macieira.info - thiago (AT) kde.org
   Software Architect - Intel System Software Products