How to check if there exists a secondary selection?

Question

Emacs has a secondary selection (not the X11 selection, rather the mouse-secondary-overlay).

On my system holding Alt-LMB dragging sets it.

How would I check if there this selection is set in elisp?

I tried checking;

(if mouse-secondary-overlay
  ... do something ...)

however this always prints "Have Second Select"

How can this be tested?

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 31 '16 at 09:09

2

(gui-get-selection 'SECONDARY)

returns nil if there is no secondary selection. (if your Emacs is older than 25.1, use x-get-selection instead)

answered Oct 31 '16 at 09:09

xuchunyang

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Minor detail, I don't want to get the actual text, just to know if a secondary selection exists. – ideasman42 Oct 31 '16 at 16:17

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 31 '16 at 08:46

This can be done by checking if the start of (overlay-start mouse-secondary-overlay) is not nil.

This is a function that uses the secondary selection, then the primary as a fallback.

(defun mouse-yank-secondary-and-deselect (click)
  "Deselect after yanking, for quick select-copy. Uses primary as fallback."
  (interactive "*p")
  (if (overlay-start mouse-secondary-overlay)
      (progn
        ;; use the secondary buffer and clear it
        (mouse-yank-secondary click)
        (delete-overlay mouse-secondary-overlay)
        )
    (progn
      ;; fallback to primary buffer
      (mouse-yank-primary click)
      )
    )
  )

How to check if there exists a secondary selection?

2 Answers2