Re: The Real Problem With Debian
I'm able to find the docs I need by searching either on google or TLDP. I went
through all my newbie pains with BSD and SunOS back in the 80's. But there's a
problem I've never been able to solve.
This problem isn't debian-specific, but with X and the different desktop systems.
I find the clipboard utterly incomprehensible, and nearly useless.
Try this for example:
Copy some text from a gnome-terminal and then highlight some text in the URL box
of mozilla and paste to replace it with a URL you got out of the terminal.
Or copy some text from a window, close the window (to make space on the screen)
and then paste. The text disappears, because X doesn't really have a concept of
a clipboard, but uses selections instead, and if the selection disappears, so
does your text.
It's especially difficult with a one-button ADB mouse on a Macintosh, but at
least there is a workaround available.
Mozilla manages to do it in a way that I find comfortable, but it only works
when transferring text within mozilla or from mozilla to other applications.
And it only works as long as mozilla is still running. What mozilla apparently
does is maintain an internal clipboard buffer that it declares as the selection
to the rest of X, rather than supplying text that is selected in a window but
has not been subjected to a "Copy" command.
I had an email exchange with Richard Stallman a while back about what I thought
Free Software needed in order to succeed with the masses, and I named the
mysterious clipboard as the number one problem.
(I understand why it should be this way, because what you would ordinarily want
to do is have the X server provide a clipboard buffer, but historically X
servers had very little memory, as with X terminals. But that's really not the
case now on a linux system. There's also the issue of the speed of transferring
lots of clipboard data across the network, but in most cases people are using X
on a single machine.)
Mike
--
Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting
http://www.goingware.com/
crawford@goingware.com
Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow.
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