Vignatti: X on Wayland [LWN.net]

Vignatti: X on Wayland

Posted Jun 15, 2012 19:54 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: Vignatti: X on Wayland by cmm
Parent article: Vignatti: X on Wayland

Why on earth does everyone say copy/paste doesn't work? It works exactly as well as it does on Windows, which is to say perfectly well iff you're copying something vaguely textual and both apps are still running. Shut the source app down and what you get back might not look quite as good as it did before.

You know how many people I've heard complain about this behaviour, outside this thread, in my entire life? Zero. Nobody other than geeks even *notices* it.

(As for the video tearing, well, that's something else I've never seen, and is not something that wiring policy into the graphics server would do -- or, rather, its existence is merely a consequence of the sort of transition -- to composition -- which is pretty much entirely impossible to implement if you nail lots of policy into the graphics server.)

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Vignatti: X on Wayland

Posted Jun 19, 2012 12:52 UTC (Tue) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]

>Why on earth does everyone say copy/paste doesn't work? It works exactly as well as it does on Windows, which is to say perfectly well iff you're copying something vaguely textual and both apps are still running.

Well, there do still seem to be problems with copy/paste in my recent experience.

What I want:
1) any selected text can be pasted by middle-clicking
2) any selection can be copied using ctrl+c, and then that data can be pasted using ctrl+v (preferably without needing to leave the source application running, at least in the case of plain text)
2a) shift+insert does the same thing as ctrl+v
3) no amount of 1) can interfere with 2)

What I have:
All of those things happen usually, except when they don't. Frustratingly, the specific circumstances in which things don't work as expected seem so complex as to appear non-deterministic, so I haven't learned which things I should do/not do, nor can I reproduce the problem accurately enough to make a meaningful bug report.

Strictly speaking, X is not at fault here. There's something going wrong with Klipper, or KDE, or Qt, or GTK, or some specific combination thereof, but that's sort of the problem - if X specified a policy, there would be much less scope for those things to introduce bugs/incompatibilities/design disagreements.

That's not to say necessarily that the answer truly is to wire a lot of policy into the display server (for one thing, it's probably too late - any attempts to improve the situation by adding more policy risk creating *more* incompatible combinations), but there is a real issue there.

Vignatti: X on Wayland

Posted Jun 19, 2012 20:31 UTC (Tue) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]

I am a heavy KDE user (at least 10h/day, 300 days/year) since 1998. I never ever had a problem within the requirements you describe. I only discovered that you must keep the "from" app running (WRT not losing text formatting) when this thread started... Probably I never had closed the "from" application before. :-D

Vignatti: X on Wayland

Posted Jun 20, 2012 12:43 UTC (Wed) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]

I do have some use cases which are probably rather atypical. I'm going to try to remember to keep a log of when paste does something unexpected. Maybe there are some specific applications triggering it that I've just never noticed.