OT: klipper's misbeliefs [was: NEdit & KDE loss of selection problems]

[Joerg Fischer]

wayne.lydecker at l-3com.com wrote:

> Perhaps they could be convinced to change the default
> action for "prevent empty clipboard" to off?  I doubt
> it, but it might be worth a try.

The misnomer "prevent empty clipboard"[1] is for ensuring that a
middle-click always pastes something.  As I understand the klipper 
folks now this is an essential feature for them.  On the other hand, 
Qt 'prevents an empty clipboard' automatically, so for Qt apps the
option is superfluous.

> Nedit help could also be amended with "common problems"
> that describes this situation (in laymen terms).

There is the "Solution to Common Problems" section under Help ->
Problems/Defects.  But it should just say, turn off "prevent empty
clipboard" - the description will be an essay really as the preceding
misnomer may serve to indicate.  I'm prepared to also say something
about the consequences for Qt applications resulting from this
restricting the selection to solely being a poor man's clipboard kind
of thing.  This means that a Qt based text editor has to implement its
own selection or region thing, because it can't make use of the
appropiate X feature for this. (So anyone who ever dreamed to migrate
nedit to Qt has just found another reason to forget about this right
from the start.)

Cheers,
Jörg


[1] It does *not* prevent the clipboard (technically speaking: the
    CLIPBOARD selection - but *this* is the clipboard) from being
    empty.  Also, it has nothing to do with klipper's clipboard
    history - this can't become empty unless you explicitly delete it,
    and of course the history never can contain empty strings, or so.