elisp: Window System Selections
28.19 Window System Selections
==============================
In window systems, such as X, data can be transferred between different
applications by means of “selections”. X defines an arbitrary number of
“selection types”, each of which can store its own data; however, only
three are commonly used: the “clipboard”, “primary selection”, and
“secondary selection”. Other window systems support only the clipboard.
Cut and Paste (emacs)Cut and Paste, for Emacs commands that make
use of these selections. This section documents the low-level functions
for reading and setting window-system selections.
-- Command: gui-set-selection type data
This function sets a window-system selection. It takes two
arguments: a selection type TYPE, and the value to assign to it,
DATA.
TYPE should be a symbol; it is usually one of ‘PRIMARY’,
‘SECONDARY’ or ‘CLIPBOARD’. These are symbols with upper-case
names, in accord with X Window System conventions. If TYPE is
‘nil’, that stands for ‘PRIMARY’.
If DATA is ‘nil’, it means to clear out the selection. Otherwise,
DATA may be a string, a symbol, an integer (or a cons of two
integers or list of two integers), an overlay, or a cons of two
markers pointing to the same buffer. An overlay or a pair of
markers stands for text in the overlay or between the markers. The
argument DATA may also be a vector of valid non-vector selection
values.
This function returns DATA.
-- Function: gui-get-selection &optional type data-type
This function accesses selections set up by Emacs or by other
programs. It takes two optional arguments, TYPE and DATA-TYPE.
The default for TYPE, the selection type, is ‘PRIMARY’.
The DATA-TYPE argument specifies the form of data conversion to
use, to convert the raw data obtained from another program into
Lisp data. Meaningful values include ‘TEXT’, ‘STRING’,
‘UTF8_STRING’, ‘TARGETS’, ‘LENGTH’, ‘DELETE’, ‘FILE_NAME’,
‘CHARACTER_POSITION’, ‘NAME’, ‘LINE_NUMBER’, ‘COLUMN_NUMBER’,
‘OWNER_OS’, ‘HOST_NAME’, ‘USER’, ‘CLASS’, ‘ATOM’, and ‘INTEGER’.
(These are symbols with upper-case names in accord with X
conventions.) The default for DATA-TYPE is ‘STRING’. Window
systems other than X usually support only a small subset of these
types, in addition to ‘STRING’.
-- User Option: selection-coding-system
This variable specifies the coding system to use when reading and
writing selections or the clipboard. Coding Systems. The
default is ‘compound-text-with-extensions’, which converts to the
text representation that X11 normally uses.
When Emacs runs on MS-Windows, it does not implement X selections in
general, but it does support the clipboard. ‘gui-get-selection’ and
‘gui-set-selection’ on MS-Windows support the text data type only; if
the clipboard holds other types of data, Emacs treats the clipboard as
empty. The supported data type is ‘STRING’.
For backward compatibility, there are obsolete aliases
‘x-get-selection’ and ‘x-set-selection’, which were the names of
‘gui-get-selection’ and ‘gui-set-selection’ before Emacs 25.1.
Info Catalog
elisp: Pointer Shape
elisp: Frames
elisp: Drag and Drop