On Wed, 17 Jul 2002, y wrote: > When I select text it automatically copies it to the clipboard. > While a lot of people love this feature, I just hate it. > People sometime select text to delete it, for example (especially in GUI > editors). > > Could you tell me how to disable it, or is it hopeless?
I think it is hopeless :( It's too deeply built into the X architecture to change for all clients - it's not just a question of setting a boolean flag to another value. Some clients and toolkits, however, have workarounds so the behaviour might end up being closer to your liking. Background info: (I hope I got the details right - it's complex stuff) There isn't one entity that you could call the clipboard in X, there are several. One set of those are the cut buffers, another are the selections. Cut buffers have numbers and selections have names. Usually cut buffer #0 and the selections PRIMARY and CLIPBOARD are used. When you select paste in an application, some toolkits will paste from PRIMARY first, if it is non-empty, and try CLIPBOARD next -- I think. Others will always use PRIMARY if you paste with the middle button and CLIPBOARD if you select paste from a menu or use a keyboard shortcut. The buffer for the CLIPBOARD selection gets overwritten only when you actually select copy in the application (and PRIMARY also gets written). When you select something (before the delete/copy/cut) only the PRIMARY selection gets overwritten. (there is also a standard selection called SECONDARY, just to make things more complicated - but few use that) You can read almost the whole story here: http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/clipboards.txt if you are really curious you can always check the three references at the bottom. KDE 2.x applications didn't quite follow the above standard but current KDE and Gnome apps do. Many applications not made with either won't. -Peter _______________________________________________ Xpert mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/xpert
