37061 - There's no sign whether or not Mozilla owns the X selection

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 47796

(Core :: DOM: Selection, defect, P4)

Description

[Chris Siebenmann]

Build ID: recent CVS pull from Apr 24th.

 Once you have selected some text in Mozilla, there is no sign whether
or not Mozilla owns the current X selection (ie, whether 'paste'ing in
some application will paste in the text selected in Mozilla, or some
other text from elsewhere). This is disconcerting, especially since
the text will go grey for other things (such as loss of focus for the
Mozilla window).

Reproduction:
- start mozilla from an xterm.
- select some text in Mozilla
- move cursor so focus is elsewhere (say an application you can
  paste text into; 'cat >/dev/null' in an xterm will do). Mozilla
  text selection goes dim, but paste will paste in that text.
- select some text from elsewhere. Focus back to the Mozilla
  window; selected text is fully highlighted again, as if it
  was the live selection.
- paste into somewhere. Your other selected text will be pasted.
  (This is especially dramatic if you, say, use Alt+L in Mozilla
  itself to open the 'Open URL' dialog and paste in the text;
  not even Mozilla itself respects that highlighted, 'looks
  selected to me' text).

 In my personal opinion, selected text should remain fully
highlighted while it is the current X selection (even when
Mozilla doesn't have mouse/keyboard focus), and should go
grey only when Mozilla loses the current X selection, at
which point you should be able to use Edit | Copy to make
it the current X selection again (which would cause it to
go back to being fully highlighted).

Comment 1

[Kathleen :Brade]

This sounds like a selection problem; reassign to mjudge

Comment 2

[mjudge]

should unix autocopy on focus?? akkana this is a very unix specific desire here 
so I am bumping this to you to do what you will.  Let me know if you want me to 
help.

Comment 3

[Akkana Peck]

Mike: the problem here is that other Unix apps don't separate the concepts "I
have a selection" vs "I own the clipboard".  On a normal Unix app, when someone
else asserts ownership over the clipboard selection, the app that previously
owned it unselects whatever is selected, so the user can immediately see that
that text is no longer on the clipboard.

Autocopy on focus would be very bad.  There would be no way to paste anything
into an editor window, since as soon as they focused, their previous clipboard
contents would be lost!

In mozilla, if we're going to retain a selection even after getting a message
that some other app has asserted clipboard ownership, what we *should* do is
redraw the selection so that it looks different, so that there's one visual
representation for "I have a selection and it's on the clipboard" and another,
less striking, representation (perhaps just an outline) for "This is the mozilla
selection, but it's not on the clipboard".

I thought your changes a while ago to introduce different selection types/styles
were partly to make this possible.  What's the status of it now?  Can we do
this?

Assigning back to Mike for feasability comments (but if you let me know how it
works, maybe I can do the work -- assign back to me, if so).

Comment 4

[rubydoo123]

setting to nsbeta3+

Comment 5

[Blake Ross]

*SPAM*: Changing the QA contact of all open/resolved Selection bugs from 
[e-mail] to [e-mail].  After the many great years of service 
Eli has given to Mozilla, it's time for him to move on; he has accepted a 
position at Eazel.  We'll be sad to see him go, and I'll do my best to fill his 
spot...

Comment 6

[leger]

Updating [PDT 9/1] to [PDT Check]

Comment 7

[mjudge]

ok i have another bug that includes this one allong with another problem with 
the window managers. i am duping this.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 47796 ***

Comment 8

[Blake Ross]

vrfy dup