On Thu, Sep 26, 2002 at 10:29:49AM -0700, Chuck Groom wrote:
> It's interesting to look at how different widget systems have approached
> this. For starters, I'd suggest looking at:
> 
> http://doc.trolltech.com/3.0/qclipboard.html
> http://gtk.org/tutorial/ch-managingselections.html
> 
> I think the QT example offers a slightly more fruitful starting point, 
> since the GTK+ mechanism is wed to the X Windows system,
> which I believe to be unnecessarily complicated w/r/t selections.

The X system looks like the simplest thing to implement in picogui- it's the 
application's job to do all conversions, and X's atoms are a lot like picogui's 
handles. But it has the problem of your clipboard disappearing when you close an app. 
It's types are pretty weak too.

Qt's use if mime types is nice, but at least this documentation doesn't give much 
clues to how it would map to a client/server system.

> 
> In addition to the questions of "how do we deal with data types" and 
> "where is the data stored", I'd like to add the following to the fray:
>   - Will drag-and-drop be incorporated into this mechanism?

Yes, that's a good point that I forgot to consider. Clipboards and drag&drop could 
share this method of exchanging multi-typed data between apps.

>   - What user concept of selection does PicoGUI adopt? The X-windows
>     way of making any selected text available in a selection buffer,
>     or the windows/mac os way of requiring explicit user cut/copy to 
>     the clipboad?

At the moment I'm thinking it would be best to go with requiring explicit copy paste.
Mainly this is because it's familiar to more people and applicable in a wider variety 
of situations. If you want to be able to copy/paste files in a file manager for 
example, you don't want clicking a file to automatically make that your selection when 
you had some important piece of text in the clipboard. The reason to make 
copying/cutting an explicit operation for the user is the same reason you want 
selections to persist after an app exits: you don't want the user to worry about 
whether their data in the clipboard will unexpectedly disappear.

>   
> -Chuck
> 
> 
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