Emacs 29.1 released

Posted Aug 1, 2023 15:56 UTC (Tue) by Sesse (subscriber, #53779)
In reply to: Emacs 29.1 released by NYKevin
Parent article: Emacs 29.1 released

I wasn't asking about a gnome-terminal rant, I was trying to figure out whether my understanding of your use case was correct. :-) Because if the point really only is to have a workaround for copying clipboard contents from terminal applications over SSH, that would seem rather marginal for a windowing system's functions.

Now, it sure would be nice to have some sort of network transparency for graphics even as we phase out X11. But that feels like a different issue to me.

Emacs 29.1 released

Posted Aug 1, 2023 18:35 UTC (Tue) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (2 responses)

> Because if the point really only is to have a workaround for copying clipboard contents from terminal applications over SSH, that would seem rather marginal for a windowing system's functions.

I agree. That's why I wrote a "rant" about gnome-terminal: This should be the terminal emulator's problem, not the windowing system's problem.

Emacs 29.1 released

Posted Aug 2, 2023 16:44 UTC (Wed) by Per_Bothner (subscriber, #7375) [Link] (1 responses)

"This should be the terminal emulator's problem, not the windowing system's problem."

Right - but unfortunately there is no simple portable API for accessioning the clipboard. Even for JavaScript-based terminal emulators (such as DomTerm and xterm.js) there are security policies that limit access. The simplest is to invoke a helper application - but these aren't portable either. If curious you can look at the code for get_clipboard_command in lws-term/utils.cc in the DomTerm sources.

Emacs 29.1 released

Posted Aug 3, 2023 17:27 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

In this context, OSC 52 is that API - it's an API between an application and the terminal emulator, allowing the application running in the terminal to ask the terminal emulator to perform clipboard accesses for it.

The problem is that VTE, one of the common implementations of a terminal emulator (used by GNOME Terminal, among others), deliberately doesn't support this API. As a result, instead of terminal applications like vim using OSC 52, they use a remote X11 connection to access the clipboard using X11 APIs, while rendering using terminal APIs like OSC. This is a hack around the lack of OSC 52 support in common terminal emulators.

Emacs 29.1 released

Posted Sep 18, 2023 6:55 UTC (Mon) by daenzer (subscriber, #7050) [Link]

> Now, it sure would be nice to have some sort of network transparency for graphics even as we phase out X11.

FWIW, there's Waypipe, which works more or less like X11 over SSH from a user PoV: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe

> But that feels like a different issue to me.

Yeah, since this discussion is about a feature of the terminal emulator, which should normally run locally in the user session, I'm not sure how SSH tunnelling of the display protocol is relevant.