copy to clipboard: allow preference for cell separator
Submitted by Drew Parsons
Link to original bug (#684713)
Description
The Gnumeric docs (Working With Data / Moving and Copying Data / Cut and Paste Between Gnumeric and Other Applications) say that when you copy cells, they are placed in the X clipboard as text with cells separated by spaces.
In fact the actual separator is tab, not space (should the documentation be updated to say this?).
In some cases, a tab separator is indeed useful.
There are however many cases where the tab separator is destructive, that is it actually gets in the way of your workflow. This happens when you paste into an environment with tab completion, which is very common: pasting into octave, some emacs modes, the shell command line, etc.
When tab completion is operating, the tab in the clipboard is handled as a request for completion, and therefore ignored when the context is a series of numbers.
This means if you are trying to copy numerical cell data such as 11.9748880528532 | 107.36960905508 | 0.3615916389682 | 0.00755592594826, you end up with 11.9748880528532107.369609055080.36159163896820.00755592594826 instead of 11.9748880528532 107.36960905508 0.3615916389682 0.00755592594826
That's truly not so helpful. A work-around via tr "\t" " " at the command line means double handling of the copy&paste, slowing down your workflow significantly.
It's arguably not appropriate to replace the current cell separator in the clipboard to be space instead of tab.
But it would be a good solution to make this cell separator a user preference, so you can specify when you do or do not want tab separation.
A natural place to locate such a preference would be Edit->Preferences->Tools->Copy and Paste.
Version: 1.10.x