18459 - Clipboard monitoring.

Status: VERIFIED WONTFIX

(Core :: XUL, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Joseph Elwell]

I think a cool feature (obviously one that would require a flag in your
preferences [because it could get annoying]) would be clipboard monitoring for
URLs. What I envision is when Netscape checking the clipboard regularly, and
when it finds a url in the clipboard it can do one of a few things depending on
your preferences. Default would be to ignore the URL. If the user checked,
"Monitor Clipboard for URLs" Netscape would Autoload the URL into the browser.
Suboptions of this could be: "Open in a New Window", and "Prompt on New URLs".
The code would have to keep track of what is in the clipboard so as not to keep
autoloading over and over when the url isn't new.

This is what I envision the preferences screen to contain [Maybe under "Smart
Browsing"]:
[checkbox] Monitor Clipboard for URLs
     [checkbox] Open in New Window.
     [checkbox] Prompt on New URLs

Of course the sub items would be grayed out unless the parent "Monitor..." is
checked.

Comment 1

[Peter Trudelle]

Thanks for sharing your feature idea! Resolving as later, for consideration when
we are adding new features.

Comment 2

[Claudius Gayle]

marking VERIFIED for housekeeping purposes.

Comment 3

[Matthew Tuck [:CodeMachine]]

Hmm, I don't get this feature.  What are you trying to achieve with this
request?  Is it just a quick way of of opening multiple URLs?

Comment 4

[Joseph Elwell]

For Instance: I was just reading my email in Pine, I highlighted the bug URL and
I have Mozilla open. It would be nice if Mozilla opened up that page for me
automatically. This would be an easy way to make other text based applications
quickly interface with Mozilla. Good examples are : irc, email, instant
messengers to name a few. Not all of these applications have or want to provide
the ability to understand, let alone process, URLs - but they all allow you to
copy text into your clipboard. It's not meant to be a quick way of opening
multiple urls. Instead it would be meant to provide a clean (almost seamless)
way of getting a url from any application into Mozilla.

In paticular I've used ftp clients that do this.

Comment 5

[Peter Trudelle]

Why even go to the clipboard?  Why not just have a modified-click on any URL, in
any text, cause it to be loaded?  ICe TEa on the Mac can do this, and Guru on
Windows has a similar ability.  I think the clipboard aspect introduces too many
UI problems (multiple URLs, URLs already open, overly complex prefs, etc) in
this to make it work as it stands.  I frequently copy URLs without having any
desire to load them all, so I would never enable such a feature.  Also, if I cut
an URL I would certainly be surprised to be taken there.

Comment 6

[Joseph Elwell]

I'm not certain I understand the concept of "a modified-click on any URL, in any
text". How would I get SecureCRT to understand "a modified-click on any URL, in
any text".
I don't think you would want to support multiple URLs. It would be a nightmare
parsing a whole page of text looking for URLs - it would be a smaller nightmare
to comprehend a newline-delimited string of URLs too.
This feature is targetted at users who like their current applications, that
don't have internet savvy backends, but would like to have a way to hook a
backend into the applications they use without having to track down the author
for a new feature. Albeit this is targetted for advanced users.

As far as Cutting URLs, the preferences allow verification before Auto-loading.

Comment 7

[Peter Trudelle]

Put the mouse pointer over any part of the URL text and Cmd- or Alt- click.
I still think using the clipboard for this too much trouble, has the side effect
of clobbering whatever is on the clipboard and leaving the URL, has too many
edge cases, and requires unwanted added complexity in the prefs.

Comment 8

[Matthew Tuck [:CodeMachine]]

I don't see any benefit from this, since if you want to use a URL, you'll want
to use it right away, rather than waiting for it to be processing (do OSes
support getting clipboard change events?).  So what's wrong with paste into the
location bar, or "open URL in clipboard"?

Comment 9

[Matthew Tuck [:CodeMachine]]

Maybe a solution to this is a separate program that waits on the clipboard and
can talk to Mozilla (or any browser app for that matter).  That way there's no
preference needed.

Comment 10

[Joseph Elwell]

There's nothing wrong with pasting manually. Sometimes it's just nice to have a
computer know what to do for you. Often it's annoying. Close this bug. I
think matty's idea of a seperate program is probably a cleaner solution.
I could handle clipboard preferences for auto-all-sorts-of-things. cheers.

Comment 11

[Peter Trudelle]

reopening all latered bugs

Comment 12

[Peter Trudelle]

Moving all latered bugs to M20 as ordered by project manager.  Although these 
bugs are now open, assigned and targetted, XPToolkit has no plans to 
fix/implement them in the current release cycle, if ever.

Comment 13

[Peter Trudelle]

Mass move of all M20 bugs to M30.

Comment 14

[Peter Trudelle]

Mass move of M20 bugs to M30

Comment 15

[Peter Trudelle]

Mass-moving all M20-M30 XPToolkit bugs to Future

Comment 16

[Jeremy M. Dolan]

I agree with Matthew & Joseph. As this bug is 7 months old, has zero votes, and
no comments that agree with adding this, perhaps we can WONTFIX this. I doubt
all tier-1 platforms even support clipboard monitoring, and I can see this being
more anoying then helpful when it's turned on. Pasting into 'Location:' is easy
enough.

Comment 17

[Peter Trudelle]

resolving as wontfix

Comment 18

[Joseph Elwell]

verifying.