I don't know about the connections you guys have -- likely direct, via ppp or slip or something. But I have a "shell account", running lynx (etc) via kermit dialed-into a netcom (mindspring) (weren't they too bought?) computer. Problem is this: am using CDE, a sun-version of motif, running on top of X. When I try to "blacken" on the screen a url, via my mouse, sometimes (er, often) my hand moves the mouse down a bit as it moves to the right, blackening the line I want. That minor downward movement suddenly blackens from where I am in the line I am trying to "copy", all the way to the its end, INCLUDING THE NEWLINE (it seems), and that NEXT line, up to where my mouse has dropped down to. Obviously, way too much blackened. So, I quickly move the mouse back up to the intended line, to where I had been, and all that extra blackening on the right and the first part of that following line DISAPPEAR. Great -- just what I want it to do. ... Finally, I get the mouse out to the right end of that url I want to copy, (and only what I want IS blackened now -- looks good), and I press "COPY" (over next to PASTE). THE PROBLEM -- when I PASTE it into lynx, it pastes NOT ONLY that url (as intended), but that NEWLINE TOO -- via some bug in sun or cde or x or whatever that newline never got removed when I moved that mouse back up where it belonged. --------- Now, there's nothing lynx (nor lynx-dev) can do about my paste-problem. But, I bet I'm not the only one who has SOME problem with cut/copy and paste, given all the machines and os's that lynx runs on these days. Plus, there are bound to be users that have NO cut/paste ability, given their hookups, access to lynx, etc. ---- So, a solution for everyone: You know how in the shells csh, sh, etc, you can put a "`cat foo.txt`" in the middle of a line, which back-quote evals the stuff it bounds, and substitutes that into the line you are typing in as a shell command. Well, SOMETHING to that effect would be nice in lynx, for these often super-long url's we have to enter sometimes. Basically, ANY syntax that isn't already used at the FRONT of a url would work. Maybe just a single backquote, followed by a filename. It reads the url (or whatever) from that file. ---- That way, whatever cut and paste bugs or difficulties one might have, or without cut and paste, difficulties typing in a long url CORRECTLY, you can type it into a FILE, via vi or emacs or whatever, or PASTE it into that file (even with trailing newline), and then via vi REMOVE that newline -- or have lynx IGNORE the newline when it reads a (single!) line from the file. (like a "chomp" in perl). --- That way, even without cut-n-paste, one could grab a long url embedded in a sentence by reading copying the doc to some other file, or even egrepping for http or www with output to a file, then edit that file down to just the url you want. IDEA: or urlS you want, ONE PER LINE, and the lynx-notation includes a LINE NUMBER -- default being "1". (of course there's always sed to use instead) --- Anyway, would be nice to have SOMETHING to make it easy for people to get long-urls into a response to lynx's "g" cmd, no? Especially when the name already exists within some other file. David
