Why doesn't own-selection own the selection without the mouse? [was: Re: Copy and paste from XEmacs -> gnome-terminal?]

The following message is a courtesy copy of an article that has been posted to comp.emacs.xemacs as well. Please follow up to xemacs-beta(a)xemacs.org. Martin> In XEmacs 21.4 (patch 8) "Honest Recruiter" (--with-gnome, Martin> --with-gtk), the second method (meta w) does not work. Martin> Nothing appears to go into the X selection. This is correct behavior, IMHO. Random editing should not change the content of the X selection. What you want is also correct behavior, I suppose. Martin> The obvious difference (to me anyway) is that under GNU Martin> Emacs interprogram-cut-function's value is x-select-text. Don't trust names. In this case it looks like the difference in naming reflects behavior, but often enough it just reflects the taste of a GNU maintainer. Martin> Under XEmacs its value is own-clipboard, whose Martin> documentation sounds like it should do the right thing, Martin> but "it doesn't work for me"! The X clipboard and the primary selection are different. In fact under X there are 11 selections: primary, secondary, clipboard, and 8 cut buffers. Martin> Incidently, the info section "Miscellaneous X Selection Martin> Commands" lists a bunch of commands, including: Martin> Any ideas? An obvious one (hang `own-selection' on the interprogram-cut-function) doesn't seem to work. There's a slight difference in interface between own-selection and interprogram-cut-function, I also tried (defun my-own-primary-selection (string &optional push) "Paste the given string to the window system primary selection. See `interprogram-cut-function' for more information." (own-selection string 'PRIMARY)) But that didn't seem to work either. The problem seems to be buried in the C code, it seems to be related to zmacs-region mouse handling. Using the same functions as the mouse handler uses, but from the keyboard, just doesn't work for me. -- Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN My nostalgia for Icon makes me forget about any of the bad things. I don't have much nostalgia for Perl, so its faults I remember. Scott Gilbert c.l.py