[OS X Emacs] (does anyone here have knowledge of the) interaction between clipboard and kill-ring?

[M A]

On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 2:08 AM, Michael Gilbert<mcg at gilbert.org> wrote:
> On Jul 14,2009, at 8:15 PM, Nathaniel Cunningham wrote:
>
> On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 7:22 PM, Michael Gilbert <mcg at gilbert.org> wrote:
>>
>> Can anyone comment on how the kill-ring and clipboard interact? Or how I
>> might further investigate this problem?
>>
>
> I don't know what's going on in detail, but Aquamacs is using the system
> clipboard for pasting = yanking.  From the directory Aquamacs
> Emacs.app/Contents/Resources/site-lisp/,
> grep -r "yank" . or similar ("clipboard", "kill-ring") brings up several
> likely candidates.  There is some cut-and-paste support coded into
> site-lisp/macosx/osxkeys.el, maybe that will help.
>
> Thank you, Nathaniel. That got me looking. Using C-h v kill-ring, I viewed
> its contents. A bit hard to read, but from what it looks like there is some
> sort of weird interlacing of the Mac OS clipboard and regular kill-ring
> contents.  BUT I know for a fact stuff is NOT getting killed into the
> clipboard, since I can look at the clipboard contents (or paste it
> elsewhere) and it's the last thing Cut or Copied, not the thing that was
> killed in Aquamacs.
> I am very confused.

Usually the thing to do is to try to reproduce the problem after setting emacs
to startup with no customizations etc (using the -Q option for
instance, or restarting
using the "restart aquamacs without customizations" menu item). Whether the
kill ring and system clipboard interact is usually determined by the variable
x-select-enable-clipboard, which can be customized, but the problem you
describe seems to go beyond just that.

Mark A