Re: [Annoyances] X-Windows Copy & Paste

[Mike Hearn <mike theoretic com>]

On Thu, 2003-08-21 at 15:59, Thomas Leonard wrote:
> I think that's been discussed here before, and there way some agreement to
> fix them (with Debian/unstable, nautilus currently gives file:///path and
> konq gives file:/path). However, the solution is to change both of them to
> actually follow the existing spec, not to create a new one.

Right, that's what I meant. I didn't realise there was an existing spec
for that stuff. It depends so much on having a shared VFS layer though,
that is the problem.

> In ROX, we call this 'saving', 'loading' and 'deleting' a file, but the UI
> is as you describe (s/applet/directory). You can even give them names, and
> organise them into subdirectories ;-)

Oh my sides :) The catch is, you *have* to give them names, and you have
to do an explicit "save" to get the icon you can drag. I agree it's
nice, I remember using RISC OS at school with fondness, but not quite
the same as just drag on/drag off. IIRC you could drag text/images onto
the pinboard as I described, and I know you Windows has a half baked
implementation of this. 

I can't remember what it calls them - scraps? Try dragging a piece of
text from MS Word onto the desktop and you'll see what I mean. Nobody
ever uses it though, it's hardly the most discoverable feature around.

> Unifying DND with the clipboard would be a good long-term goal. After all,
> the clipboard is really just the accessibility interface to DnD (Ctrl-C =
> press, Ctrl-V = release).

Yup. Well, you have cut vs copy, but that's a fairly subtle distinction
anyway. I'm not sure how to phrase/represent it better though.