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

[Norbert Nemec]

Philippe Joyez wrote:
> I was disappointed to realize that the handling of the selection in the
> Qt-texmacs I compiled a few days ago is still not completely conforming to
> standards. For instance, when I have an active selection, if I start typing
> text or if I paste something, the selection is not replaced by the new text.
> Instead, the selection is merely canceled and the text entered next to it.
>   
Indeed, this is one detail that is still left to do in the selection 
mechanism of TeXmacs. It should not be too hard to implement - I don't 
know when I might get to it. It is not high priority for me, but I agree 
that it would be nice to have.


> Also the "insert" key does not seem to toggle the usual insert/overwrite
> mode, at least in my configuration.
>   
I don't think TeXmacs has an "overwrite" mode at all. The problem may be 
already finding a proper definition for the behavior. All is easy while 
editing plain text, but what should happen to formatting information or 
any non-text elements when you "overwrite" them?

Personally, I find overwrite mode quite handy in text editors in plain 
ASCII, fixed-character width setting. I don't think I have ever used it 
in a variable-width font. It might be nice to have in preformatted 
environments within TeXmacs. Otherwise, I think it is not really worth 
the trouble.

> Is this the intended behavior, or is there a configuration switch I missed
> somewhere? If it is normal, would it be hard to change the code in order to
> (at least as an option) delete any existing selection when something is
> inserted from the keyboard or the clipboard? 
>   
I am not sure. Should be straighforward but it might be non-trivial to 
get the behavior "quite right". In my experience it takes a lot of 
tweaking until such a change has exactly the effect that you intend in 
all the possible different cases.