Re: NSTextField -becomeFirstResponder / NSTextView -copySelection

[Fred Kiefer]

Hi David,

I did not understand your problem. For me this sounds like "I did write
a becomeFirstResponder method that calls selectText, but I don't want it
to call selectText under certain conditions", which surely is not the
case.

At least I am able to answer your last question:
> I'm also wondering, why
> NSTextViews -setSelectedRange:affinity:stillSelecting:
> copies the selection to the pasteboard in the first place?

This was my idea and at the FOSDEM the GNUstep developers (or was it
only Richard and me?) agreed to add this feature. The idea of
copySelection is that a user selects part of a text and is able to paste
it without using the normal copy/paste mechanism. In the standard setup
of GNUstep paste is bound to the middle mouse button and the whole
mechanism works between all well behaved Unix applications, e.g. Emacs.
This usage of two independent clipboards is a standard feature in Unix
environments and there is even a general agreement in the Unix desktop
community how it should be used. To be fully compliant with that we will
have to switch the X pasteboards we use for this, a step I wanted to do
as soon as I have Emacs 21 and KDE 3 running as these two project also
used the wrong way.

Our or better my failure was not to announce this new feature of
NSTextView enough and that I did not make it optional, but I just could
not think of anybody not wanting it!