On 2012-11-01, Hans-Peter Deifel <[email protected]> wrote:

Hi List!

I think that the interaction between visual-mode and the X11 selections is not optimal. Since I don't know if the current behavior is intentional, I haven't yet opened a bug report.

The selected text in visual-mode is currently copied via the function x-select-text. With the Emacs 24.1 default configuration, this copies to the X-selection CLIPBOARD (configurable through x-select-enable-clipboard and x-select-enable-primary.)

In the rest of Emacs, this function is only used for the explicit copy/yank commands. Copying the active region is controlled by the variable select-active-regions and uses the PRIMARY X-selection by default.

This behavior is consistent with most other X applications: The mouse selection is saved in PRIMARY and the explicit copy/paste commands use the CLIPBOARD.

Thus, it would be nice if Evil would also use the PRIMARY selection by default for the selected text in visual-mode.

If this works on all other platforms as well (also compared with Vim), then that's fine with me. I remember that I had some trouble with MacOS and this x-selection stuff. Unfortunately I do not have access to a Mac or to a Windows machine, so it would be nice if others could verify that this change works there, too (in all settings, i.e graphical environment and terminal, Emacs 23 and Emacs 24). I would change the "fbound" line, though. #+BEGIN_SRC elisp (defun evil-visual-update-x-selection (&optional buffer) "Update the X selection with the current visual region." (with-current-buffer (or buffer (current-buffer)) (when (and (evil-visual-state-p) (fboundp 'x-set-selection) ; <-- small change, hope it works ;) (or (not (boundp 'ns-initialized)) (with-no-warnings ns-initialized)) (not (eq evil-visual-selection 'block))) (x-set-selection 'PRIMARY (buffer-substring-no-properties evil-visual-beginning evil-visual-end)) (setq x-last-selected-text-primary )))) #+END_SRC Best Frank