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Whatever happened to the Secondary Selection?

Cross-posted to 2 groups.

Followups directed to: comp.os.linux.x

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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

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Whatever happened to the Secondary Selection? Charles Lindsey <chl@clerew.man.ac.uk> - 2016-08-20 21:01 +0000
  Re:Whatever happened to the Secondary Selection? dlbendigo  <laidlaws@hotkey.net.au> - 2016-09-17 18:10 +1000
    Re:Whatever happened to the Secondary Selection? Lew Pitcher <lew.pitcher@digitalfreehold.ca> - 2016-09-17 10:40 -0400
      Re: Whatever happened to the Secondary Selection? gazelle@shell.xmission.com (Kenny McCormack) - 2016-09-18 11:14 +0000
      Re:Whatever happened to the Secondary Selection? Charles Lindsey <chl@clerew.man.ac.uk> - 2016-09-27 20:11 +0000

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