Re: Cut-Copy/Paste behavior

Daniel,

Thanks.  As you said ....

    "If you select a piece of text by dragging, that will
    go into the buffer, and the previous selection deselected."

Actually, it seems to be true whether you do a mouse-drag select or a 
keyboard select (control and/or shift while using arrow keys or home/end).

*This is the problem/annoyance.*  I understand that it is a feature, 
however, if makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible to do a paste 
that *replaces* text.

In a "productivity application" it is unacceptable (IMHO) to have to delete 
the replaced text in a separate operation (either before or after the 
pasting).  Having to do so introduces greater possibilities for errors.

Another spot where it is a big pain in the butt: replacing filenames in a 
gui file manager type application.  It is tremendously convenient to: 
select a fileNAME (edit mode), copy it somehow, switch focus to another 
window with the file manager running (or same window, different or same 
directory), select another fileNAME (in edit mode) and PASTE to replace 
that filename (and maybe edit it).

However, as you point out, this operation cannot be done under the 
unix/linux model of selection/copy/paste.

Since, probably like most people on this list, I fly a computer all day 
long, seven days a week, 10-12 hours a day, any little thing to speed 
things up really helps.  Anything that slows things down is a tremendous 
annoyance.  Since my personal productivity is 100% equated with my 
compensation, it is a really big deal.

For those that don't agree with the statement immediately above: Your 
command line editing, repeating, and command completion has hereby been 
disabled.  :-)

Thanks for your comments!

Jay

Daniel C. von Asmuth wrote:
> Thus quoth Jay Smith on Tue, Sep 09, 2003 at 03:16:02PM -0400:
> 
>>Daniel,
>>
>>What I don't understand (because my 2-button + wheel/button mouse is not 
>>working [configured?] properly) is: Since simply highlighting text DOES put 
>>content into *some* buffer, does using the middle mouse button to do the 
>>pasting, cause the *correct* content to be pasted?
>>
>>What I mean is that if I get focus on the source window and it has 
>>highlighted text and I then get focus on the target window and it also has 
>>some ALREADY highlighted text, the highlighted text in the target window 
>>goes into *some* buffer.
> 
> 
> If you select a piece of text by dragging, that will go into the buffer, and
> the previous selection deselected. If you are using Cygwin the situation is
> more complicated. 
> 
> Many applications, from 'vi' to 'gimp', implement their own copy buffers, in
> addition to what X uses. For instance StarOffice started out as a Windows
> application, and reimplements that convention.
> 
> Kind regards,
> 
> 
> Daniel von Asmuth
> 

-- 
Jay Smith

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