Re: Emacs kill/copy under X versus under Windows

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Sun, 30 Aug 2009 12:54:17 -0400
> From: Jeff Clough <jeff@chaosphere.com>
> 
> Under X, killing and yanking text with the "normal" commands (such as 
> kill-line) only diddles the kill ring and doesn't touch the clipboard 
> selection.  Copying text in another application does not affect what you 
> get when doing C-y in Emacs.  C-y doesn't care about your clipboard 
> selection at all and neither does C-k, etc.  When you *do* care about 
> such things, there are specific commands (like "Copy" from the menu) 
> that let you do things.
> 
> Under Windows, this isn't true at all.  Whatever you last killed goes 
> straight to the clipboard, and whatever you last copied in another 
> application gets dumped into your buffer with a yank.

As Drew pointed out, this is a feature.  Unlike X, which has primary
and secondary selection in addition the the clipboard, Windows has
only the clipboard.  So on Windows Emacs uses the clipboard as the
primary selection would be used on X (well, almost, because the
semantics of the clipboard and the primary selection are different).