Re: [Texmacs-dev] Patches: copy/paste and selection handling.

[Norbert Nemec]

Dear Joris,

great news. Let's just hope that I remember all my work a few months 
ago... :-)

I just checked the changes that you put on top of my patches and I am 
not sure whether I agree. The name "mouse" selection was chosen very 
intentionally: As far as I understood the various documents and comments 
on the web, the mouse-buffer on X-Windows should really work exclusively 
for selections made with the mouse. A mouse-middle-click should just 
paste the last mouse-selection, no matter what you did with the keyboard 
in between. This is also the behavior that I observed in several other 
applications, so at least on X-Windows this seems to be standard. Of 
course, this means that the content of the mouse-buffer should be 
preserved beyond the lifetime of the visible selection. If you select by 
mouse and then move around with the keyboard or the scrollbars or even 
click on the text to place the cursor (without dragging) the 
mouse-buffer should still contain the content of the original selection 
and paste it on middle-click.

Therefore, changing the meaning from "mouse" to "visible" is confusing 
in two ways: It allows keyboard actions to interfer with what is 
supposed to be a pure mouse mechanism by FreeDesktop standards, and it 
suggests that the content of this buffer might be lost once the 
selection is not visible any more, which should not be the case either.

As for the imprecise positioning of the cursor on middle-click: This is 
exactly what happens in any other editor as well. The positioning on 
middle-click is just as sensitive to the exact mouse position as the 
positioning on left-click. I don't quite understand why you worry about 
this specifically. What is the connection to the removal of selections 
on mouse click?

So far, I never to the Qt version running stable to test it (every time 
I compiled it over the past months it would crash and burn for other 
reasons...) I fixed all issues that I found from reading the sources but 
could not try it out.

Greetings,
Norbert




Joris van der Hoeven wrote:
> Dear Norbert,
>
> I am just resuming my work on TeXmacs... starting with your pending patches.
> Thanks for the good work ! This makes cut-and-paste behaviour far more standard.
> I applied all patches. A few remarks:
>
> 1) I changed the "mouse" selection into "visible" selection and
>    also use the "visible" selection for the current keyboard selection
>    (made using control space in Emacs mode or shifted cursor keys otherwise).
>   
> 2) I am fine with removing the current selection on mouse clicks,
>    except for one potential drawback: when pasting using middle click,
>    the cursor has not yet been positioned in a very precise manner.
>    This is important in TeXmacs contrary to emacs, because different
>    cursor position may be very (even infinitely) close graphically.
>    Anyway, I do not see any appropriate fix, so we probably have
>    to live with this drawback.
>
> 3) Since the visible selections become much less persistant
>    (they are only used in combination with middle clicks),
>    it makes sense to replace the selection on keyboard or paste events,
>    as is usual under Windows / MacOS, at least if we are not in Emacs mode.
>
> 4) I don't think that the new implementation of delete is a problem
>    for users of the Emacs mode: in Emacs, one rather uses C-w anyway.
>
> 5) Did you check whether the behaviour is correct for the Qt version?
>
> 6) In the future, we should implement kill rings and multiple selections.
>    This is on the list since a while, but, well...
>
> Best wishes, Joris
>
>
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