Path: csiph.com!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail From: Charles Lindsey Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.x,comp.windows.x Subject: Whatever happened to the Secondary Selection? Followup-To: comp.os.linux.x Date: 20 Aug 2016 21:01:33 GMT Lines: 37 Message-ID: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: individual.net zmBAk24iZGISMurwdtsE/gu+dumYOX+pdMOdcif9yxvp6BDD0= Cancel-Lock: sha1:uspPxBXEvLjbaIhLar++K094BhE= User-Agent: Pan/0.139 (Sexual Chocolate; GIT bf56508 git://git.gnome.org/pan2) Xref: csiph.com comp.os.linux.x:242 comp.windows.x:218 For over 20 years, I have been using the secondary-selection (a standard feature of the X-Windows system) when editing texts, using the Solaris operating system on Sun Hardware. Recently, I have switched to Linux on i86 hardware, and have been horrified to find that this valuable feature is not supported by modern toolkits and editors. The world seems to have forgotten what it was meant for, and yet I believe it is the best thing since sliced bread. This is not the place to explain what the secondary-selection does, and why it should be used more widely. To see that, I invite you to visit my website at http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl/secondary-selection.html which I hope will persuade you that something needs to be done about it. However, the purpose of this message is to introduce my Experimental Extension to GTK-3 so that you guys can try it out for yourselves and to see how useful it can be for constructing texts (and particularly program texts, where there is a common requirement to grab existing bits of code - perhaps even just identifiers - from other places, whether in the same document or from outside). My implementation is based on gtk+-3.10.8, because I am using Ubuntu 14.04LTS "Trusty Tahr", though it may well work on other Linux versions. Yes I know 3.10.8 is ancient, but I don't expect my code, which is pretty hairy, to be fit for immediate incorporation in current versions of gtk. But it now works well enough for it to be tested more widely, and if you and other people like it, then I would be happy to join the GTK Developer Team and to do the job properly. So please look at my website, download my code, give it a try and report your experiences here. (Note, followups set to comp.os.linux.x). -- Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing ------------------ Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl Email: chl@clerew.man.ac.uk Snail: 5 SK8 3JU, U.K. PGP: 2C15F1A9 Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5