GTK clipboard problems

[Daniel Yek]

Hi,

On Wed, 2004-12-01 at 08:52, Owen Taylor wrote:

> On Tue, 2004-11-30 at 22:28 -1000, Warren Togami wrote:
> > Since around RH7.3, I remember gtk2 applications would sometimes be 
> > unable to copy & paste between each other after long runtimes within a 
> > GNOME session.  



> (:-) please make sure to clearly distinguish
> 
>  - The clipboard
>  - Middle button paste (primary selection)
> 
> http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Standards_2fclipboards_2dspec


I'm wondering if there is a mechanism to disable the Middle-click
Pasting (the X Window System Primary Selection mechanism). It is a good
feature to be able to do that at a "global" desktop level (as opposed to
application level) because the concept of two pasting mechanisms isn't
very easy to grasp, especially for people who haven't read the protocol
specification at freedesktop.org or X Window System programming
documentation regarding atom Primary, Secondary, and Clipboard. (Those
were the documents in which I first encountered the Primary Selection
and Clipboard concept - not in a user manual or Tips of the Day.) The
Middle-click Pasting mechanism is easily discovered by novice users, but
at that point, there is no guide/documentation readily available for
users to be able to explore the use of it. Instead, users would stumble
through many unexpected behavior before concluding that cut-and-paste is
broken on this system (because there surely isn't any help available to
give them the correct concept that there are two mechanisms where
Middle-click pastes from Primary Selection - the high-light - and the
Clipboard mechanism requires explicit cutting/copying, not just
high-lighting.)

What can be done so that a global setting to enable/disable Middle-click
Pasting is available? Is these protocols implemented by individual
applications or is it implemented by the GTK toolkit? If it is the
later, a GConf setting for the entire desktop can be provided, right? Is
there such a thing already? If so, is a global setting already
available? And if so, should Middle-click Pasting default to disabled at
Fedora Core installation time?


-- 
Daniel.

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