Clipboard Confusing Defaults and Documentation

[drdrjacobs]

The default clipboard configuration is confusing and there isn't much clipboard discussion to be found in the docs or other issue reports.

Confusing Defaults

By default the Emacs variable select-enable-clipboard is t as specified here. As a result, kill and yank will access the clipboard.

However, by default meow-use-clipboard is nil as specified in the docs. Consequently, the meow versions of the commands meow-kill and meow-yank will not access the clipboard.

The interplay between these defaults is confusing. For example, lets say I am in INSERT mode, and use C-k to kill line A. Now I exit INSERT mode and then use meow-kill to kill line B. Finally, I re-enter insert mode, and use C-y to yank. I expect this yank will give me line B, the last thing I killed. However, I instead get line A.

Setting meow-use-clipboard to t as a fix: not recommended

If I set meow-use-clipboard to t, I will get the behavior I expect. However, this is listed as "Not recommended" in the docs. There is no reason given, but presumably the idea is to keep kill/yank functionality separate from the clipboard.

Keeping the clipboard separate

If it is desirable to keep the clipboard and kill/yank separate, how do you implement this? Do you use SimpleClip or a custom setup?

[eshrh]

I was also confused about why use clipboard is off by default in meow. At least in my case, I have meow-use-clipboard on all the time. If meow's idea is to wrap emacs defaults then it should match then meow commands should match the behavior of their equivalents...

[montchr]

The nil default for meow-use-clipboard also causes an unexpected disconnect between meow-save (y) and the Emacs default binding of C-y to yank.

When the option is nil, calling meow-save then yank (via C-y) will not insert the text from meow-save. Instead, yank will insert the text from a previous kill.

For some reason, the text saved by meow-save and text saved with kill-line (C-k) always seems to be stored in an unpredictable order. I wasn't able to deduce its ordering logic directly with a couple minutes of trial-and-error, which is also why I don't have a snippet to test. But it always seems that meow-saves will tend to be pushed further back in the slot of the kill-ring, and kill-ring items saved by non-Meow actions seem to be prioritized ahead of Meow's saves. I intentionally did not look at the code to understand why this would be happening because I don't want to rationalize it.

When meow-use-clipboard is non-nil... none of that weirdness happens at all.

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[Edit]: I like that Meow has gotten me more comfortable with core Emacs behavior and even its keybindings thanks to the project's admirable philosophy of augmenting instead of replacing (e.g. evil-mode) of Emacs functionality. For that reason, I do find myself alternating frequently between using Meow bindings and core Emacs bindings even within the course of writing a single paragraph or function or whatever. That is a good thing. And that is why any inconsistent behavior becomes more frustrating -- with Meow, inconsistencies become less expected than if I were using evil-mode.

[DogLooksGood]

There were some hacks around the copy/paste in the past, so I was not sure about the compatibility. So I documented as "not recommended". If people think it works well with the clipboard, then I should update the document, or maybe even the default behavior.