From kde-usability Fri Nov 01 16:57:27 2002 From: Havoc Pennington Date: Fri, 01 Nov 2002 16:57:27 +0000 To: kde-usability Subject: Re: Clipboard for the dummies X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-usability&m=103616977110710 Lubos Lunak writes: > 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 BTW I think it's harmless to the basic X11 model to change this so that you always paste the last thing you highlighted. But if something new is highlighted, it would always need to be pasted, and if something won't be pasted, it can't be highlighted. That is, if you can see a highlighted selection, MMB really really has to paste it. *cough* Mozilla *cough* ;-) > - only text selected by the mouse becomes the selection (i.e. not text > selected by keyboard, or autoselected lineedits) Special-casing mouse selection seems questionable to me. Especially in light of accessibility concerns, when you remember that some users will only use the keyboard, or will use the keyboard primarily. > - when there's no selected text, selection is still remembered (the last valid > selection) - this is why Qt lineedits unselect on focus out, while Gtk ones > don't This is fine I think. > - explicit actions like 'copy link location' set selection, even if there's no > text selected (I couldn't find any such action in any Gtk2 app to test, > Havoc?) Maybe Galeon2 has it, I don't know. As I said earlier, one idea here is to actually *draw* the highlight for the URL, i.e. it would become selected in a user-visible way when you choose this menu item. > Remember, it would be nice if we did it the same way like others do, so we'd > have to make at least Qt and Gtk work the same, in case we don't go with the > X11-pure style (Havoc: any chance?). There's certainly some chance. I would expect Owen to be fairly hard to convince that we should break the current X11 specs in a backward-incompatible way, but then you may well get supporting opinions from say the GNOME UI team. Also, GTK should certainly work like Windows when running on Windows, and I'm not sure it does right now, so it would make sense to have GTK at least optionally able to work like Windows. The important thing I think is to avoid making a unilateral decision here, since while either the current X11 specs or a new more Windows-like setup work fine if applied consistently, they are both pretty broken if half the apps do one and half the other. ;-) Users just complained *so much* about the situation in the past that I hate to recreate it. If we go to a Windows-like setup, it seems to me that we basically have to break the MMB paste. You can imagine the flames this will inspire. While we can say "the last selection you made gets pasted by MMB" my feeling is that if you can typically see several highlighted selections on the screen, MMB becomes pretty hard to use. On the implementation side what Windows-style means is that we would probably have an X selection for each toplevel window. Maybe it could be called PRIMARY_. Considering the possibility of out-of-process components (and XEMBED), it should really be done via an externally-visible X selection rather than all in-toolkit in-process. The summary decision to be made I think: - if we continue to conform to current X11 specs, that's certainly easier. Most toolkits/apps are already close to conforming, and people that have researched the issue already understand how it's supposed to work. However, we get the funny global selection. - if we go Windows-style, we get per-window selection, but most apps are currently broken: Motif apps, Windows, GTK, XEmacs, almost everything. We would have to make a backward-incompatible spec change and then convince the world that it was a good idea (after we've already been trying to convince them for a while to do it the traditional X11 way). Also, MMB paste becomes near-useless. Essentially, is moving to Windows-style selection important enough to endure a few years of transition period and quite a few flamewars? That's the question in my mind. Havoc _______________________________________________ kde-usability mailing list kde-usability@mail.kde.org http://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-usability