File: mouse-copy.el.html

What is `mouse-copy.el'?

It provides one-click text copy and move. Rather than the standard stroke-out-a-region (down-mouse-1, up-mouse-1) followed by a yank (down-mouse-2, up-mouse-2 or C-y), you can now stroke out a region and have it automatically pasted at the current point. You can also move text just as easily. Although the difference may not sound like much, it does make mousing text around a lot easier, IMHO.

If you like mouse-copy, you should also check out mouse-drag for `one-click scrolling'.

To use mouse-copy, place the following in your init file:
(require 'mouse-copy)
    (global-set-key [M-down-mouse-1] 'mouse-drag-secondary-pasting)
    (global-set-key [M-S-down-mouse-1] 'mouse-drag-secondary-moving)

(These definitions override the old binding of M-mouse-1 to
mouse-drag-secondary. I find I don't use that command much so its loss is not important, and it can be made up with a M-mouse-1 followed by a M-mouse-3. I personally reserve M-mouse bindings for my window manager and bind everything to C-mouse.)

History and related work:

One-click copying and moving was inspired by lemacs-19.8. Throw-scrolling was inspired by MacPaint's `hand' and by Tk's mouse-2 scrolling. The package mouse-scroll.el by Tom Wurgler
<twurgler@goodyear.com> is similar to mouse-drag-throw, but
doesn't pass clicks through.

Originally mouse-copy was part of a larger package. As of 11 July 96 the scrolling functions were split out in preparation for incorporation into (the future) emacs-19.32.

Known Bugs:

- Highlighting is sub-optimal under 19.29 and XFree86-3.1.1
  (see \M-x mouse-copy-work-around-drag-bug for details).
- mouse-drag-secondary-pasting and mouse-drag-secondary-moving
  require X11R5 (or better) and so fail under older versions
  of Open Windows (like that present in Solaris/x86 2.1).

Future plans:

I read about the chording features of Plan-9's Acme environment at
<http://www.zip.com.au/~cs/app/wily/auug.html>. I'd like
to incorporate some of these ideas into mouse-copy. The only lose is that this is not the current Emacs Way Of Doing Things, so there would be a learning curve for existing Emacs users.

Thanks:

Thanks to Kai Grossjohann
<grossjoh@dusty.informatik.uni-dortmund.de> for reporting bugs, to
Tom Wurgler <twurgler@goodyear.com> for reporting bugs and suggesting fixes, and to Joel Graber <jgraber@ti.com> for prompting me to do drag-scrolling and for an initial implementation of horizontal drag-scrolling.

   -johnh, 11-Jul-96

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