Ãyvind Harboe wrote:
I'm going out on a limb here, as my experience with xfree86 is extremely limited. Perhaps there is an option to achieve what I'm suggesting here.
Oh well! :-)
xwinclip is clobbering the clipboard when I work w/e.g. OpenOffice:
- If I copy and paste a spreadsheet cell while xwinclip is running, only the value is copied. - If xwinclip is not running, I can copy and paste formulas without problems.
Yes, that is a valid problem.
AFAICT, xwinclip clobbers the remote clipboard by doing a "conversion round-trip": remote clipboard->windows clipboard->remote clipboard. Such round trip conversions are inheritely lossy and should be avoided.
After examining the source code(see below), I've come up with the following "scheme" for a fix:
- register a new dummy windows clipboard data type, e.g. named "REMOTEDATA". - whenever xwinclip updates the Windows clipboard, it also invokes SetClipboardData(REMOTEDATA, dummyval). - whenever xwinclip executes a paste from the Windows clipboard to e.g. an OpenOffice spreadsheet not running under Windows, xwinclip first checks if REMOTEDATA is present in the Windows clipboard. If the flag is present, xwinclip effectively needs to do nothing because the remote clipboard already contains the correct data.
No, that scheme does not work.
The problem is that we have to grab ownership of the X clipboard each time that either the X clipboard or the Windows clipboard changes. So, we can't even attempt your idea because it requires that the original provider of the X clipboard data still be around when the request comes to paste that data; by grabbing ownership of the clipboard we tell that X app to dump the data to us in a single format. This essentially means that OpenOffice no longer knows that it put in the clipboard; we have to tell it.
Your idea is part of what we will do when we use the XFIXES extension to monitor changes to the clipboard instead of stealing ownership of the clipboar each time another application changes it. I wrote the code a while back to work with the XFIXES extension but it was never completely finished. Maybe I will get to it soon.
Harold
