Re: [Texmacs-dev] TeXmacs keyboard behavior

[Norbert Nemec]

Stephan Mucha wrote:
> I felt very glad when I saw Lionels patch for "Make selection
> behavior more standard conformant" as this is a very important point
> for my work with TeXmacs.
>   
As Lionel pointed out, the patch was originally created by me. However 
due to the general lack of interest in the issue (Lionel was the only 
one who responded at all) I gave up trying to work on it.

> Unfortunaly, it doesn't adress one important problem: Selections always
> go to clipboard which makes it impossible to copy one selection to the
> clipboard and then select something else and replace it with the
> former selection. Furthermore, selections aren't replaced by paste
> operations, so that copy/paste a selection to/from secondary clipboard
> doesn't work either (and the corresponding shortcut "C-V 2" seems not to
> work - it means C-(V,2), isn't it, but as soon as I press the "V", a
> simple paste is done - composed shortcuts like "M-i =" work correctly).
>   
Indeed, this is the major point that I tried to address in the patch. I 
succeeded only part of the way: Without the patch, [Del] and [Backspace] 
used to do a "Cut" operation, overwriting the content of the buffer. 
With the patch, you can copy text in one place, select some other text, 
delete this and paste the text from the buffer.

Directly replacing the content of an active selection when 
inserting/pasting text still does not work. It would have meant a larger 
redesign of the selection handling in the code which I did not want to 
undertake at this point of time.

As it is, the patch goes half the way. However - it seems nobody is 
interested in a partial improvement of usability.

> Afaik, most unix X11 applications which support both types of
> selection behaviour separate the two: If one part of an document is
> selected it is only available by pressing the middle mouse button and
> by C-V or S-Ins if explicitly copied to clipboard via C-C or C-Ins. So
> they seem to hold two clipboards, one for the current selection and
> one for copy/paste operations - resp. only the latter and extract the
> current selection only if requested by pressing the middle mouse
> button without real clipboard handling.
>
> Did I get something wrong? I would like to contribute to the selection
> behaviour, but I didn't find out how to do it on the scheme side,
> although I understood the patch of Linonel (little chances for me at
> the c++-side, i simply have no idea of it)

In fact, this is something I did not look into at all. As it seems, even 
X11 itself has more than one buffer. If I want to copy text from other 
applications, I often have to open some "intermediate" editor, paste 
text there and copy it again to be able to paste it in TeXmacs. I have 
no full understanding of these issues, though.