Re: [Annoyances] X-Windows Copy & Paste

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Thu, Aug 21, 2003 at 03:19:45PM +0100, Thomas Leonard wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 21, 2003 at 02:57:58PM +0100, Mike Hearn wrote:
> > On Thu, 2003-08-21 at 14:20, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > > The problem that does need solving is persistence of clipboard after
> > > an app exits, ideally without harvesting a selection and freezing its
> > > format immediately.
> > 
> > Don't forget things like the fact that we can only copy and paste text
> > reliably. IIRC there is no standard format for images, or files.
> 
> Why not just use the MIME types, as we do for drag-and-drop (which works
> just like the clipboard anyway)?
> (image/png, application/octet-stream for your examples)
>

The clipboard formats are supposed to be the same as the DND formats, 
for the most part.

The missing piece here is just a very simple registry document on 
freedesktop.org, listing each format name and describing the format.
I've been trying to get someone to do that for ages.

Dropping X selections doesn't get this done any faster. No matter what
IPC mechanism you use, you still have to document a list of formats.

Havoc