Copy and Paste (was: QIF syntax question)

[Jeb Bateman]

On Wed, Oct 10, 2001 at 11:29:14AM -0500, Linas Vepstas wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 09, 2001 at 05:12:20PM -0700, Dave Peticolas was heard to remark:
> > On Tue, 2001-10-09 at 10:15, Linas Vepstas wrote:
> > > 
> > > Well, maybe we should fix cut & paste to work on whole transactions,
> > > rather than on individual cells.   
> > 
> > It has for some time. Try 'Duplicate' from the register toolbar
> > and transaction cut/copy/paste from the register edit menu.
> 
> Oh, uhh, funny, my eyes never looked that far down on the menu ...
> ctrl-x, ctrl-v is as far as I got.
> 
> Why not make ctrl-x, ctrl-v work for transactions instead of strings?  
> Using a menu for cut-n-paste of strings strikes me as 'dumb', a
> microsoft-emulation idiocy.  

If I'm not mistaken, it's actually Macintosh-emulation since those
keyboard shortcuts have been standard in the Mac GUI since 1984.  
I don't know when they were copied by M$.  Pre 1995?

> With X11, a 'highlight' is by default a copy to the global
> clipboard, and a middle-button is already a paste from the clipboard
> (or you can use the clipboard menus ...), so we don't need yet
> another mechanism in gnucash, agreed?

I personally enjoy the X middle button paste, (except when I don't
have a three button mouse... emulation sucks); but it's not obvious to
new users, (and they can't "discover" it by looking through the menus,
which is the whole advantage to the popular menu-based GUI).

I don't know, on one hand I agree with you.  I would rather C-x C-v
copied and pasted transactions.  But then again, many people will be
confused and lost by the inability to copy/paste text via the Edit
menu.  Perhaps it could be coded to copy the current transaction if no
text was selected, (and otherwise copy the text).  Is that possible?

-jeb