Re: Is Cygwin X server causing ubuntu eclipse to copy to the clipboard on selection?

[David Karr <davidmichaelkarr at gmail dot com>]

On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 6:22 AM, Jon TURNEY <jon.turney@dronecode.org.uk> wrote:
> On 23/06/2012 00:33, David Karr wrote:
>> I run Eclipse on win7, and also Eclipse on Ubuntu, displaying the
>> window on my Win7 box, using Cygwin.
>>
>> One annoyance I have with the latter is that when I select a region of
>> text, it appears to automatically copy that region to the clipboard,
>> instead of waiting for me to press Ctrl-C.
>>
>> I asked about this on the eclipse forums, and they said Ubuntu Eclipse
>> doesn't do this, and it's likely being done by my X server.
>
> Yes, the X server is copying the selected text to the Windows clipboard.
>
> Let me try to explain why:
>
> X supports an arbitrary number of 'selections', the two of interest here are
> the PRIMARY selection (which conventionally contains some data which the user
> has selected) and the CLIPBOARD selection (which conventionally contains some
> data that the user has explicitly requested to be 'copied' to the clipboard)
>
> The Cygwin X server monitors these selections for changes, and makes text in
> the most recently changed one available for pasting from the Windows clipboard.

It seems like you've just explained to me by using the word
"conventionally" that the behavior of the Cygwin X server doesn't
behave "conventionally".

> So, if you select some text in eclipse after copying some text to the
> clipboard, you will get the selected text, not the copied text, when you paste
> in Windows.
>
> I can understand this behaviour is confusing to people who are expecting the X
> clipboard to behave like the Windows one.
>
> It has been suggested a few times that we should not monitor the PRIMARY
> selection, but some very popular X applications (such as xterm and emacs) only
> use the PRIMARY selection by default. ?It's also been suggested that
> monitoring the PRIMARY selection should be configurable somehow, but I'm not
> sure that a global configuration option would lead to very useful behaviour.

I just verified that I can easily configure Emacs to not copy to the
clipboard on selection, and to replace the selection on yank.  It's
unfortunate that I can't directly configure Eclipse to do this, but I
would be surprised if they would have thought to implement this, as
Eclipse normally works "the way you expect" on both Ubuntu and
Windows.  It's only when displaying the Ubuntu window on Windows
through Cygwin that it behaves "unconventionally".

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