Interfacing with clipboard (from Tkinter or whatever) - newbie quetion

[Porky Pig Jr]

Hello,

this question is strictly speaking is not about Python, and even not
about Tkinter, but the general concept of clipboard. yet I've done
some searches on usenet and just didn't see the group which seemed to
be right to post this question. So it goes here. I'm reading through
'Programming Python', learning Tkinter, and got into the section which
discusses the clipboard. I'm runing Python (2.3.3) on Linux, RH 9.0
with KDE. The book only says that clipboard is 'system-wide storage
repository' and talks about Windows, and how we can exchange the data
using clipboard, even if some other program knows nothing about
Tkinter.

So I've decided to give it a shot - under Linux/KDE. Ran the example
of simple editor, simpleedit.py, which implements clipboard
(interfacing from Tkinter), cut the text, and tried to place it into
different applications. VIM worked fine. KDE Notepad worked fine.
EMACS didn't work at all (seems like it's using its own clipboard?)

so I'm a bit confused here, and may be somebody can explain where does
clipboard lives on Unix. that is, is this a part of desktop manager
(such as KDE), or it will work under some more generic window manager
(such as IceWM)? Finally, does anyone know what's the story with
Emacs?


TIA