anilgulecha/trelby — comment on commit 63ca6c80b465de4dd5057c08953af22721925224
File:  line 0
By oskusalerma:

The thing about the unix PRIMARY clipboard is that it should be populated no matter how something is selected, i.e. with the mouse or keyboard. That's how emacs and other text editors that use it work, and if we're going to support it, that's how we should work too.

The problem of course with that is it would be slow. Copying once on mouse click is no big deal. Copying every time the cursor moves as the user adjusts the selection area with the keyboard would be slowing down the program, 99.99% of the time for no benefit to the user.

Do you have an actual usecase for supporting PRIMARY?

Also, https://github.com/oskusalerma/trelby/wiki/Contributing says this as a guideline:

"Is your patch cross platform? Will it work on both Windows and Linux?"

Guidelines are just that, guidelines, not fixed rules, and obviously platforms differ in how they do things. But we should consider carefully before introducing very different behavior between platforms and only do it if the benefits outweigh the costs. For PRIMARY, I'm not sure they do. In my experience I run across people using unix systems all the time lately who do not even know PRIMARY exists, and do copy/paste in linux just like they do in windows, because that's what they're used to, and that's what all modern linux programs support. So PRIMARY is a bit archaic and not really something that people necessarily expect to be available in all programs nowadays.