improve PRIMARY buffer copy-paste behaviour, paste over

[Johannes Thrän]

On 3/6/20 11:08 AM, Thomas Kluyver wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 6, 2020, at 1:43 AM, Thiago Macieira wrote:
>> You mean middle click while the left button is still held down? That
>> effectively means dragging the text from source to destination.
> If I've understood Johannes correctly, what he's proposing is slightly different from drag & drop:
>
> 1. Click & hold, drag to select source text, release (setting PRIMARY buffer)
> 2. Click & hold, drag to select text to be replaced, middle click (paste from PRIMARY), release
>
> Thomas
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No not quite. :)  Sorry I should have been more verbose. I'm talking 
about dragging it's about pasting, I'll try to clarify:

The following ctrl-c, ctrl-v workflow is, I think, very common:

1. select some text,

1a, ctrl-c

2. in another window select some other text

2b, ctrl-v

-> the text from 2. got replaced by the text from 1.


I'd like the middle mouse click to also be able to do that, i.e:

1. select text (not drag)

2. in another window select some other text, hold click

2a, middle mouse click.

... release.


It does not work because most of the clients:

a, immediately update the PRIMARY buffer when the selection changes, so 
it's gone in step 2.

b, or not replace the selected text with the primary buffer, but paste 
at the cursor (or somewhere, literally)


So I propose:

- instead of a, we only update the PRIMARY buffer, when the selection is 
finished.

- instead of b, we'd do the same as ctrl-v does, that is replace the 
selected text region.


Just to make sure: I really don't want to change any existing behaviour.


Johannes