Clipboard Support

[reduz]

It would be really awesome to get portable clipboard support, which is something i very much miss in SDL. I write like to write portable audio apps as hobby and this is a feature i miss a lot.

Cheers!

[Laurent]

Well, clipboard hasn't much to do with multimedia programming. If you want to write portable apps requiring more OS-related features, you'd rather use a cross-platform GUI framework like wxWidgets or Qt.

[reduz]

Well, clipboard hasn't much to do with multimedia programming. If you want to write portable apps requiring more OS-related features, you'd rather use a cross-platform GUI framework like wxWidgets or Qt.

Actually, I believe it has a lot to do.. first, most custom audio applications have custom UIs and don't like to rely on "native" looks (wxwidgets/qt). http://www.chibitracker.com is an app of mine which is an example of this.

Second is that not only applications but several games have pretty advanced built-in UI toolkits where you edit options or even multi player chat, set server IP addresses or hostnames, etc. Such toolkits will undoubtly benefit from a simple portable clipboard api so text can be copied from or pasted into the game.

Many years ago I worked on this project as lead engineer: http://www.regnumonline.com.ar , and by the time I found the lack of clipboard support in SDL limiting, as our GUI had to be very complex (as of with any MMO) as it was impossible to copy/paste text into it.

Cheers!

[Wizzard]

I agree that this would be a valuable addition to SFML. In fact, I believe it is of above normal priority because of how beneficial this can be to so many different kinds of applications.

[tgm]

I would vote for clipboard support, too - though it seems to be quite hard under linux...

[jbadams]

Sounds to me more like something that would be good as a very leightweight stand-alone library - for one thing, your example usage doesn't actually make sense yet in absense of a GUI package.

[reduz]

Sounds to me more like something that would be good as a very leightweight stand-alone library - for one thing, your example usage doesn't actually make sense yet in absense of a GUI package.

Most professional games have their own portable UI Libraries. Also, most audio applications (many using SDL like renoise, schism, etc) write their own libraries.
In any case, I'm not sure why you assume that whoever makes a game UI will be always using a standalone library.
Interacting with the OS native clipboard is an extremely simple feature but which is of use for those who would like text copied from/to their game or app, so i don't see why not supporting it natively in SFML.

It is already a need myself and other developers already have and had in the past.

[reduz]

I would have to agree with Laurent, this is jsut far outside the scope of SFML, and far from cross-platform.

Why? I know i have no vote here, but still I don't really see any factible argument of why NOT:

Pros:

-Can copy/paste clipboard into/from the game from/to th e native OS in a cross platform way, useful for complex in-game or app GUIs
-It's a very simple feature, easy to mantain, great for those who write their own in-game UIs

Cons:

"far from cross platform" <- makes no sense to me
"far outside the scope of SFML" <- it has uses in games and apps programed in SFML, plus it's easy to do
"makes no sense since developers deploy their stand alone gui libraries" <- haven't seen the case yet

[Laurent]

Well,even if I decide to include it one day, it will certainly be one of the lowest priority tasks. Everyone says it's easy to implement, so I think people who really need it would better not wait for me and implement their own version.