Nedit & KDE loss of selection problems

[Scott Tringali]

> [1] This is the normal way of working, btw, select something and type
>     then the selection is lost.  It is rather unusual under X to
>     change the buffer while keeping a selection there, so that you can
>     send the selection to klipper at any time klipper requests so.  I
>     also looked at kate, but kate doesn't seem to use the X selection.
>     When I select something in kate I can also select something in
>     nedit and have both selections at the same time.  But AFAIK there
>     is only one primary selection under X. That is, if I have two X
>     clients and I do a primary selection in one of them, a possible
>     primary selection in the other one should be lost.

It looks like the KDE text areas follows the Windows model where every 
app can have its own distinct selection.  But X can really only have one 
selection, no matter how hard you try, so it looks like they simply 
leave the highlighting on even when it's really not selected, and the 
last text to be selected wins.  If you make a null selection, that's 
ignored and, it leaves the old one in place.  This a bit sad, when you 
middle-click paste you can't tell visually what is going to be pasted. 
You have to remember.  It seems they are trying to make the selection 
more clipboard-like.  Which is a mistake, since there is a clipboard and 
the clipboard is very clipboard-like.

Note if you pull up gedit, it follows the rules better - selecting text 
in one app deselects the text in the other app.  So in GTK, you can have 
have an empty selection.  Deselect anything, and then middle click- 
inserts nothing.  This is an odd downside, as some people expect a null 
selection to mean "well, remember what my last selection was and paste 
that, and I don't want to use the clipboard which would do that for me" 
based on experience with xterm, the apparent Holy Grail of copy/paste, 
mostly because it has no functionality other than copy/paste.

The GTK folks seem to get it right.  I wonder if gedit has the same 
problems with klippy.  If it does, then it certainly can't be our fault, 
but their intepretation of the ICCCM rules.

FWIW, this must be KDE and not Qt- I use Qt in other places and it's 
well-behaved.