From kde-usability Fri Nov 01 14:18:35 2002 From: Maksim Orlovich Date: Fri, 01 Nov 2002 14:18:35 +0000 To: kde-usability Subject: Re: Clipboard for the dummies X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-usability&m=103616043400407 On Fri, 1 Nov 2002, Lubos Lunak wrote: > The most in-the-spirit-of-X11 way, which Gtk, xedit use, is like this: > Selection is selected text, and selected text is selection (the ONLY > selection). Which means: > - selected text, no matter how selected, will be pasted by MMB > - if there's nothing selected, MMB won't do anything > - if you open a dialog with a lineedit which autoselects the text (i.e. the > default, but you can start typing whatever you want immediately), this > becomes the selection pasted by MMB, and as soon as the dialog is closed, MMB > will paste nothing > - if you select something in one app, previous selected text is unselected, no > matter where it was, even in other app (this a bit conflicts with the 'if you > don't know about MMB, it won't get in your way at all' claiming) Personally, I think this (implementation-centric) model violates one of the stated principles of the agreed-to clipboard behavior: That Select/MMB clipboard is completely transparent and invisible to a user, and that Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V matches semantics many users are used to from Mac and Windows. Basically, I imagine that if one doesn't know about the implementation details of X mechanisms, it'd be rather mysterious and annoying to have some text explicitly selected by the user become unselected after doing something that appears to be entirely unrelated - i.e. doing something in an another document or a very different implementation. That's particularly true if the user doesn't have klipper runnings/isn't familiar with its function, and is just keeping a few things selected to make it easy to paste multiple items repeatedly (I hav edone that myself). Further, it seems weird that one clipboard would be an imperative one - i.e. stuff gets copy-pasted when the user asks for it, while the other one would be more state-based; before reading your description I certainly thought of selection as an imperative clipboard, too -- that MMB pastes the last thing selected by the user; but that's not really that big of a deal if we consider this to be a power-user feature, while affecting a more "basic" feature's behavior IMHO is... Thanks, Maksim _______________________________________________ kde-usability mailing list kde-usability@mail.kde.org http://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-usability