Re: X11 copy/paste and drag-and-drop

[Eric Wasylishen]

Another point David reminded me of: 
While working on this, I didn't really see the point of running gpbs in a 
separate process. It seems like the main use would be for running on a system 
that didn't have a native clipboard system, which we don't do.

If I update the NSPasteboard to match the 10.6 API, I would be tempted to get 
rid of gpbs, and refactor the existing x11/windows clipboard code from xpbs.m 
and win32pbs.m to the respective server backends (XGServer/Win32Server).

Does anyone see any problems with this approach?

-Eric


On 2011-08-07, at 4:09 PM, Eric Wasylishen wrote:

> Hey,
> 
> I did some investigating of why copy/paste from X11 apps to GNUstep doesn't 
> work well (only plain text was working), and drag-and-drop doesn't work at 
> all for me between GS and non-GS apps.
> 
> I fixed one set of bugs in xpbs a few days ago, so now you can copy and paste 
> rich text from OpenOffice.org to Ink, as long as you copy the text in 
> OpenOffice to the clipboard _before_ Ink/gpbs are started.
> 
> The remaining problem is that we aren't updating the list of types on the 
> pasteboard when the selection changes in non-GS applications. I committed 
> part of a fix for this; now xpbs.m is notified when the selection owner 
> changes (e.g. from plain text in gnome-terminal to rich text in 
> OpenOffice.org.) However, it doesn't yet do anything with this information.  
> My current idea is something like: 
> 
> - xpbs receives notification that the selection owner changed
> - xpbs calls a private NSPasteboard method -invalidateCurrentTypes, which 
> means the next time someone calls -[NSPasteboard types],  we need to ask X11 
> for the currently available types (as implemented by -[XPbOwner 
> availableTypes]
> 
> I'm not really sure how to implement this as I don't fully understand the 
> interaction between gpbs.m and NSPasteboard.m, but I think the approach would 
> work.
> 
> 
> I also debugged a drag-and-drop session from Abiword to Ink, and the place 
> where it fails is
> [[NSPasteboard pasteboardWithName: NSDragPboard] types] returning nil, when 
> it should have returned the types being dragged. So, it's essentially the 
> same underlying problem as copy/paste, since the dragged data is just another 
> X11 selection like PRIMARY or CLIPBOARD.
> 
> Regards,
> Eric