Hacker News Reader

> Contrast this way of operation to what other systems (like Windows and Mac) do: the content is copied to a central place, and then copied out to be "pasted".

This is a gross oversimplification to how Windows manages the clipboard. In the general case, the situation is not much different from X11 and the data stays in the sending application until requested - and is lost on program exit.

View on HN

Really? That doesn't match my experience.

I've just tried: Open Notepad; write something, select and copy it. Exit Notepad. Open browser. Paste. What was written in Notepad gets pasted.

Yes, really. Windows supports 'delayed rendering' (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/dataxchg/cli...), whereby an application can choose to not provide the data until requested. Thus, applications have a choice of either providing the data directly if it's a smaller amount, or delaying that if the amount is large enough that a performance impact can be expected.

Moreover, Windows will request that applications that are closing provide their previously advertized clipboard data, making the feature pretty much transparent to users. And some applications ask if you will still need your previous clipboard data when they close (Excel is one, I seem to remember).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com