GTK clipboard problems

[Owen Taylor]

On Sat, 2004-12-04 at 16:23 -0800, Daniel Yek wrote:
> 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.)

My guess is that discovering middle button paste isn't something that
people do accidentally; rather it's something they are told about
by someone else. I'm not sure allowing a sysadmin to turn it off
on one set of machines is going to improve the user experience.

Regards,
						Owen

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