J. Craig Woods wrote:
> At 07:43 PM 1/15/2002 +0000, Derek Jennings wrote:
>
>> Well if you have no mouse wheel try the middle button..
>> Now you have learned something.....
>
>
> Well I guess I am just plain SOL: I do not have a mouse with a middle
> button, and, no, I did not enable any kind of middle button emulation.
> After decades of computer work, I am still unsure of why I would need a
> wheel or middle button. Does this kind of junk really do something useful?
Xwindows has, as far back as I can remember (around X11R3 or so)
always had multiple (Primary, secondary, etc.) clipboards or
'selections' as I think they call them.
Selections is probably a better term because I don't think X ever
really puts the data in any type of third-party clipboard. Instead
the most common thing I've seen is that the data is just selected
in one app and then when the user requests the dat to pasted, it is
sucked straight out of the first app that still has it selected.
Also, for as long as I can remember, the standard X11 way of requesting
a 'paste' has been to hit the middle button on the mouse. This hasn't
been much of a problem since historically most UNIX/X11 systems have
had 3 button mice.
The problems different users start to have appear when applications
start to try to implement a more Mac/Windows clipboard cut/copy/paste
mechanism. Most try to avoid the 'normal' X (primary) selection
mechanism, and instead store the cut or copied selection in one of
the alternate X buffers. The reason this causes problems is that
the application you want to paste into needs to know which buffer
the item you want to paste is stored in. This works great for cut
and past in sthe same app or between apps by the same developer.
It can even work if the apps share a development library like
Motif or GTK - But it still causes problems.
I've seen cases where the cut,copy,paste keys on a sun keyboard do
something different than the cut,copy,past menu items, which also
do something different than the highlight, middle mouse paste.
This is good example of an over engineered solution.
-Kyle
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