Re: On cut, copy, paste etc...

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Fri, 01 Aug 2008 20:01:45 +0100
> From: David De La Harpe Golden <address@hidden>
> CC: Sven Joachim <address@hidden>, address@hidden, 
>  address@hidden
> 
> There are many X Selection "objects", some of which have basically
> nothing to do with any user-visible "selection" (e.g. mediating who's
> the current compositing manager...).
> 
> Under fd.o conventions, the PRIMARY X Selection is supposed to
> correspond to the last selected-by-the-user thing (the thing currently
> highlighted on screen, typically) and be inserted with middle-button
> click.  Another, the CLIPBOARD X Selection, is supposed to correspond to
> the last explicitly cut/copied (typically C-x/C-c) thing and be inserted
> with paste (typically C-v).  The two are supposed to be essentially
> separate.
> 
> http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/clipboards-spec
> 
> With unpatched emacs, no matter what settings you set, there /is no way/
> to get it to do the exact "right" (w.r.t. fd.o) thing. Emacs tends to
> set and get the "wrong" one, or set and get both, and generally
> irritates and confuses users used to fd.o conventions.
> 
> Some long-time (often pre-fd.o or even pre-ICCCM) X/emacs users like it
> that way and dislike fd.o conventions in the first place (the fd.o
> conventions make X app cut/copy/paste seem much like other platforms,
> with the highlight/middlebutton PRIMARY interaction as a "bonus").

Okay, but what does all this have to do with the original issue?  You
are asking for a different behavior of C-w; I'm saying that no matter
how it behaves wrt the X selection and the clipboard, we could modify
kill-region in small ways so that clipboard-kill-region would be
unnecessary, and we then could bind kill-region to menu-bar>Edit>Cut.