improve PRIMARY buffer copy-paste behaviour, paste over

Johannes Thrän johannes.thraen at gmail.com
Fri Mar 6 12:33:15 UTC 2020


On 3/6/20 11:34 AM, Benjamin Berg wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Thu, 2020-03-05 at 21:24 +0100, Johannes Thrän wrote:
>>   - 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
> I don't think that interaction is well enough defined. i.e. if you
> double or tripple click to select words/lines then you would need to
> define that the buffer must only be updated after the
> double/triple/quadruple click timeout happens.

You are right. If I get the wayland protocol for primary selection 
right, it also also discourages the clients to update the buffer 
whenever the selection changes and formulates it along the lines of: 
"when the selection is finished".

There are widgets that do what you specified. My thunderbird preview 
windowlet for example.

>
> Trying the combination, it feels quite hard to pull off to me and
> really not discoverable at all.
>
> Benjamin

Tom discovered it many years ago, didn't he :). No seriously, of course 
this is very not obvious. It would be a power user feature that one has 
to be introduced to, like many others. Think of it this way: many regard 
the middle mouse paste as a unique selling point for linux. Improving on 
an already existing unique selling can only be good. It might not be 
easy to do first try :) yes. I don't find it hard, but even if: never 
having to think about pressing ctrl-c *before, would be certainly worth 
practicing.

Johannes

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