GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 68230
cut or copied files are lost if view is switched (list vs. icon view)
Last modified: 2004-12-22 21:47:04 UTC
There is no indication that this shouldn't work. If I select some files from the List view and ^C or right-mouse and select Copy Files, then switch to another folder not using a List view, when I try to paste files I get a message in the bottom bar saying that the clipboard is empty. However, the same operation in Icon view works.
The reverse also seems to be true - copy a file from icon view, and you can't paste it to list view. copy/paste list->list and icon->icon both seem to work.
I think this might be the problem in X where you can't paste if the window you are pasting from is gone by the time you do the paste. Other systems like Windows and Macintosh don't have this strange limitation, but X does, perhaps because of the old style X clipboard. A test case to try to check this hypothesis is to copy from an icon view, change the window to a list view, and then try to paste into another window's icon view. If this fails, then that's likely the problem, and we can re-summarize this bug to reflect that.
I tried the test, and indeed that is the problem. If I set one window with list view, copy a file, and paste into a new window, it works fine. If I change the list window view to icon before doing the paste, nothing copies. One UI bug then is that Paste Files is still active in the right-mouse menu, when there is nothing to paste. Does Nautilus have a mechanism to work around this (major) annoyance with X? Whatever happened to the "tray" concept that was discussed on the list a few months ago (I've been unsubscribed for a while so I haven't kept track)?
Using GtkClipboard in GNOME 2, the selection will be stuck to a persistent dedicated window, so we'll only lose the clipboard when exiting the app, not when closing a window or switching views (except out-of-process views since those are apps that will exit). It's really quite simple to fix the entire problem by writing an xclipboard kind of daemon, as long as you're willing to accept the tradeoffs involved (copying more data, and losing some formats the data could have been provided in). To get a "perfect" solution (passing data to the daemon only on application exit) would require a bit more thought on someone's part but still shouldn't be that hard, someone with the requisite knowledge just has to do it, and no one in the history of X has ever gotten off their butt and done so. ;-) To be fair, not that many people have the requisite knowledge.
I plan to fix this by porting to GtkClipboard.
Adding GNOME2 keyword.
i think that andersca said that this was fixed. I might be wrong though
Yeah, should be a dup somewhere but I'm just closing this one now.