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* Is Cygwin X server causing ubuntu eclipse to copy to the clipboard on selection? @ 2012-06-22 23:33 David Karr 2012-06-25 13:22 ` Jon TURNEY 0 siblings, 1 reply; 5+ messages in thread From: David Karr @ 2012-06-22 23:33 UTC (permalink / raw) To: cygwin-xfree I run Eclipse on win7, and also Eclipse on Ubuntu, displaying the window on my Win7 box, using Cygwin. One annoyance I have with the latter is that when I select a region of text, it appears to automatically copy that region to the clipboard, instead of waiting for me to press Ctrl-C. I asked about this on the eclipse forums, and they said Ubuntu Eclipse doesn't do this, and it's likely being done by my X server. I checked the Cygwin-X11 FAQ and the command-line options, and I don't see anything that specifies this. -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://x.cygwin.com/docs/ FAQ: http://x.cygwin.com/docs/faq/ ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 5+ messages in thread
* Re: Is Cygwin X server causing ubuntu eclipse to copy to the clipboard on selection? 2012-06-22 23:33 Is Cygwin X server causing ubuntu eclipse to copy to the clipboard on selection? David Karr @ 2012-06-25 13:22 ` Jon TURNEY 2012-06-25 15:54 ` David Karr 0 siblings, 1 reply; 5+ messages in thread From: Jon TURNEY @ 2012-06-25 13:22 UTC (permalink / raw) To: cygwin-xfree; +Cc: davidmichaelkarr On 23/06/2012 00:33, David Karr wrote: > I run Eclipse on win7, and also Eclipse on Ubuntu, displaying the > window on my Win7 box, using Cygwin. > > One annoyance I have with the latter is that when I select a region of > text, it appears to automatically copy that region to the clipboard, > instead of waiting for me to press Ctrl-C. > > I asked about this on the eclipse forums, and they said Ubuntu Eclipse > doesn't do this, and it's likely being done by my X server. Yes, the X server is copying the selected text to the Windows clipboard. Let me try to explain why: X supports an arbitrary number of 'selections', the two of interest here are the PRIMARY selection (which conventionally contains some data which the user has selected) and the CLIPBOARD selection (which conventionally contains some data that the user has explicitly requested to be 'copied' to the clipboard) The Cygwin X server monitors these selections for changes, and makes text in the most recently changed one available for pasting from the Windows clipboard. So, if you select some text in eclipse after copying some text to the clipboard, you will get the selected text, not the copied text, when you paste in Windows. I can understand this behaviour is confusing to people who are expecting the X clipboard to behave like the Windows one. It has been suggested a few times that we should not monitor the PRIMARY selection, but some very popular X applications (such as xterm and emacs) only use the PRIMARY selection by default. It's also been suggested that monitoring the PRIMARY selection should be configurable somehow, but I'm not sure that a global configuration option would lead to very useful behaviour. As always, patches welcome :-) -- Jon TURNEY Volunteer Cygwin/X X Server maintainer -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://x.cygwin.com/docs/ FAQ: http://x.cygwin.com/docs/faq/ ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 5+ messages in thread
* Re: Is Cygwin X server causing ubuntu eclipse to copy to the clipboard on selection? 2012-06-25 13:22 ` Jon TURNEY @ 2012-06-25 15:54 ` David Karr 2012-06-28 14:49 ` Jon TURNEY 0 siblings, 1 reply; 5+ messages in thread From: David Karr @ 2012-06-25 15:54 UTC (permalink / raw) To: cygwin-xfree On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 6:22 AM, Jon TURNEY <jon.turney@dronecode.org.uk> wrote: > On 23/06/2012 00:33, David Karr wrote: >> I run Eclipse on win7, and also Eclipse on Ubuntu, displaying the >> window on my Win7 box, using Cygwin. >> >> One annoyance I have with the latter is that when I select a region of >> text, it appears to automatically copy that region to the clipboard, >> instead of waiting for me to press Ctrl-C. >> >> I asked about this on the eclipse forums, and they said Ubuntu Eclipse >> doesn't do this, and it's likely being done by my X server. > > Yes, the X server is copying the selected text to the Windows clipboard. > > Let me try to explain why: > > X supports an arbitrary number of 'selections', the two of interest here are > the PRIMARY selection (which conventionally contains some data which the user > has selected) and the CLIPBOARD selection (which conventionally contains some > data that the user has explicitly requested to be 'copied' to the clipboard) > > The Cygwin X server monitors these selections for changes, and makes text in > the most recently changed one available for pasting from the Windows clipboard. It seems like you've just explained to me by using the word "conventionally" that the behavior of the Cygwin X server doesn't behave "conventionally". > So, if you select some text in eclipse after copying some text to the > clipboard, you will get the selected text, not the copied text, when you paste > in Windows. > > I can understand this behaviour is confusing to people who are expecting the X > clipboard to behave like the Windows one. > > It has been suggested a few times that we should not monitor the PRIMARY > selection, but some very popular X applications (such as xterm and emacs) only > use the PRIMARY selection by default. It's also been suggested that > monitoring the PRIMARY selection should be configurable somehow, but I'm not > sure that a global configuration option would lead to very useful behaviour. I just verified that I can easily configure Emacs to not copy to the clipboard on selection, and to replace the selection on yank. It's unfortunate that I can't directly configure Eclipse to do this, but I would be surprised if they would have thought to implement this, as Eclipse normally works "the way you expect" on both Ubuntu and Windows. It's only when displaying the Ubuntu window on Windows through Cygwin that it behaves "unconventionally". -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://x.cygwin.com/docs/ FAQ: http://x.cygwin.com/docs/faq/ ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 5+ messages in thread
* Re: Is Cygwin X server causing ubuntu eclipse to copy to the clipboard on selection? 2012-06-25 15:54 ` David Karr @ 2012-06-28 14:49 ` Jon TURNEY 2012-06-28 16:10 ` David Karr 0 siblings, 1 reply; 5+ messages in thread From: Jon TURNEY @ 2012-06-28 14:49 UTC (permalink / raw) To: cygwin-xfree; +Cc: davidmichaelkarr On 25/06/2012 16:53, David Karr wrote: > On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 6:22 AM, Jon TURNEY wrote: >> On 23/06/2012 00:33, David Karr wrote: >>> I run Eclipse on win7, and also Eclipse on Ubuntu, displaying the >>> window on my Win7 box, using Cygwin. >>> >>> One annoyance I have with the latter is that when I select a region of >>> text, it appears to automatically copy that region to the clipboard, >>> instead of waiting for me to press Ctrl-C. >>> >>> I asked about this on the eclipse forums, and they said Ubuntu Eclipse >>> doesn't do this, and it's likely being done by my X server. >> >> Yes, the X server is copying the selected text to the Windows clipboard. >> >> Let me try to explain why: >> >> X supports an arbitrary number of 'selections', the two of interest here are >> the PRIMARY selection (which conventionally contains some data which the user >> has selected) and the CLIPBOARD selection (which conventionally contains some >> data that the user has explicitly requested to be 'copied' to the clipboard) >> >> The Cygwin X server monitors these selections for changes, and makes text in >> the most recently changed one available for pasting from the Windows clipboard. > > It seems like you've just explained to me by using the word > "conventionally" that the behaviour of the Cygwin X server doesn't > behave "conventionally". Sorry, no. I am using "conventionally" here in the sense of "for an application which conforms to the X 'Inter-Client Communication Conventions Manual' [1]" The Cygwin X server (or rather, it's built-in clipboard client which integrates with the native Windows clipboard) conforms to these conventions. It would be a bug in that client if it was altering the X CLIPBOARD selection when the PRIMARY selection is changed. I don't think that is happening, but you don't have to take my word for the contents of these selections, you can examine them for yourself using 'xsel -p' and 'xsel -b'. The question you are asking ("Is Cygwin X server causing ubuntu eclipse to copy to the clipboard on selection?") doesn't distinguish between the Windows clipboard and the X clipboard. I assume that the problem you are reporting is with pasting to a Windows application. To reiterate, the clipboard integration client adopts a simple heuristic to determine which of the PRIMARY or CLIPBOARD X selections to place in the Windows clipboard: it uses the most recently changed one [2] I agree it would be nice if this behaved more in line with user expectations in this specific case. Ideally this would be achieved by improving this heuristic somehow, rather than adding another command line option. So, again, this is acknowledged as something which could be improved, the problem is understood, but "someone has to do it". >> So, if you select some text in eclipse after copying some text to the >> clipboard, you will get the selected text, not the copied text, when you paste >> in Windows. >> >> I can understand this behaviour is confusing to people who are expecting the X >> clipboard to behave like the Windows one. >> >> It has been suggested a few times that we should not monitor the PRIMARY >> selection, but some very popular X applications (such as xterm and emacs) only >> use the PRIMARY selection by default. It's also been suggested that >> monitoring the PRIMARY selection should be configurable somehow, but I'm not >> sure that a global configuration option would lead to very useful behaviour. > > I just verified that I can easily configure Emacs to not copy to the > clipboard on selection, and to replace the selection on yank. It's > unfortunate that I can't directly configure Eclipse to do this, but I > would be surprised if they would have thought to implement this, as > Eclipse normally works "the way you expect" on both Ubuntu and > Windows. It's only when displaying the Ubuntu window on Windows > through Cygwin that it behaves "unconventionally". I'm not sure what you are suggesting here, but changing the default behaviour of the Cygwin X server so it requires everyone who uses it to reconfigure their emacs is not an acceptable solution. [1] http://www.x.org/releases/current/doc/xorg-docs/icccm/icccm.html [2] I slightly simplify here. The XFIXES extension only allows monitoring for changes of selection ownership, only the application owning a selection knows when it changes. This can cause other problems, see https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5735 -- Jon TURNEY Volunteer Cygwin/X X Server maintainer -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://x.cygwin.com/docs/ FAQ: http://x.cygwin.com/docs/faq/ ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 5+ messages in thread
* Re: Is Cygwin X server causing ubuntu eclipse to copy to the clipboard on selection? 2012-06-28 14:49 ` Jon TURNEY @ 2012-06-28 16:10 ` David Karr 0 siblings, 0 replies; 5+ messages in thread From: David Karr @ 2012-06-28 16:10 UTC (permalink / raw) To: cygwin-xfree On Thu, Jun 28, 2012 at 7:49 AM, Jon TURNEY <jon.turney@dronecode.org.uk> wrote: > On 25/06/2012 16:53, David Karr wrote: >> I just verified that I can easily configure Emacs to not copy to the >> clipboard on selection, and to replace the selection on yank. It's >> unfortunate that I can't directly configure Eclipse to do this, but I >> would be surprised if they would have thought to implement this, as >> Eclipse normally works "the way you expect" on both Ubuntu and >> Windows. It's only when displaying the Ubuntu window on Windows >> through Cygwin that it behaves "unconventionally". > > I'm not sure what you are suggesting here, but changing the default behaviour > of the Cygwin X server so it requires everyone who uses it to reconfigure > their emacs is not an acceptable solution. Certainly not. It was just an observation. -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://x.cygwin.com/docs/ FAQ: http://x.cygwin.com/docs/faq/ ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 5+ messages in thread
end of thread, other threads:[~2012-06-28 16:10 UTC | newest] Thread overview: 5+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed) -- links below jump to the message on this page -- 2012-06-22 23:33 Is Cygwin X server causing ubuntu eclipse to copy to the clipboard on selection? David Karr 2012-06-25 13:22 ` Jon TURNEY 2012-06-25 15:54 ` David Karr 2012-06-28 14:49 ` Jon TURNEY 2012-06-28 16:10 ` David Karr
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