This was something I had noticed before, but not thought much of. I checked 
again, and it is still there.

Selecting text is inconsistent in how it goes to the clipboard. In some 
programs, selecting text using the keyboard allows it to be pasted with the 
middle mouse-button. In others, selections made by the keyboard do not.

In all Qt widgets, selecting text with the keyboard doesn't replace the text 
in the buffer.

In the KWrite widget, it does.

I personally prefer to have the selections made by keyboard be sent to the 
buffer. I think it is more consistent to have the middle mouse-button paste 
whatever was last selected, not whatever was last selected by the mouse.

Some standardized behavior should be chosen, to enhance consistency on the 
desktop.

I would much prefer to change Qt, as KWrite is more reasonable and is 
following the standard. At the least, Mozilla and OpenOffice both perform 
the same (selection by keyboard replaces the buffer), and we know for a 
certainty that many users will have those applications in their desktop.

As far as I can tell GTK apps (I tried gAIM, gFTP, and AbiWord) are just 
flat-out broken. Selecting text with either the mouse or the keyboard erases 
the buffer but doesn't replace it. AbiWord performs the same as OpenOffice 
for text selected in the body of the document, but not in the common GTK 
widgets.

I didn't get to test KOffice, as it's broken at the moment for me. If anyone 
can find some other examples of how this is used, that would be good. I 
can't find any motif applications on my computer to test them, although 
that's not too important as they are really fading away. If anyone has a 
GNOME installation to work on, it might be good to check how some of the 
GNOME programs handle this.

I looked at what was up on freedesktop.org and saw nothing about this. They 
mention middle-mouse-button paste, but don't seem to state the behavior for 
text selections in the matter, only for the separation between selecting 
text and giving explicit copy/cut commands. Depending on what other people 
have to say here, we should send something along to freedesktop.org as well.

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