You may be able to hack some of the controls to support text selection but you won't be able to do it for the general case. For example this wouldn't work in Word. So I don't see this working. In fact it could break assumption made by the application. In my opinion, the only way to copy data from a Windows App to X is via control-c/Clipboard API.
Yes, true
In Windows, to copy data you generally need to select the data (Under X this would grab the PRIMARY selection) and then hit control-c (Under X this would grab the CLIPBOARD selection).
In think we should always be grabbing both PRIMARY and CLIPBOARD and releasing them when we loose either (ClearAllSelections=1). This seemed to be the least confusing for many users as well.
I don't agree with that, the X clipboard spec is very clear on this, and most apps are now in compliance. Mixing them together is what Qt used to do, and people found it very confusing when they couldn't figure out what was going on with the clipboard.
I think the old standard interface is good (select to copy, middle-click to paste) and generally consider apps that don't support it to be broken. I find it to be much easier to use than the Windows/Mac method which requires using menu items to copy text. I didn't believe the claims that Linux would suffer from widespread adoption by Windows users, but it seems that it is happening.
At the very least, Wine should be configurable to work either way. I want all clipboards to use PRIMARY, because that is the behavior that I am used to. I don't care what some standards body claims is correct (at least not when it only affects how I use my computer, and not how my computer interacts with other computers). I would like to be able to select text in a window and then paste it into a Wine program, which can not be done with CLIPBOARD (or at least it is not the standard behavior of programs right now). I also want to be able to paste anything I cut/copy from Wine programs by middle clicking. Just because Windows has a worse user interface than Linux doesn't mean Wine has to follow.
Ideally, I would also like to be able to paste by middle clicking. Since Windows does not generally use the middle mouse button, it should not cause problems for Windows programs to lose the middle button. But that is a less important feature.
James