Re: emacs24/gtk3 - how to mark rectangle of to primary selection?

[Yuri Khan]

On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 4:19 AM, suvayu ali <fatkasuvayu+linux@gmail.com> wrote:

> I think the limitation is in X; it is not rectangle aware. Maybe Emacs
> can "fool" X into thinking a rectangle kill to appear as a normal kill
> region.

FAR Manager on Windows has rectangular selection and copy/paste.

The Windows clipboard is not inherently rectangle-aware. An
application that copies content to clipboard can provide a prioritized
list of formats, so that the receiving application can choose the
first one it supports. So, in FAR, when a rectangle is copied, the top
format is a custom format tag, followed by CF_UNICODETEXT, followed by
CF_TEXT (which stands for “text in the locale-specific legacy single-
or multibyte encoding”). This way, if the block is then pasted back in
FAR, it knows to paste it as a rectangle, while other applications
paste as a plain garden-variety Unicode text block.

As far as I understand, the corresponding concept in X is “Target
Atoms”, ICCCM chapter 2.6.2.