Question

I use emacs 24 (OSX) and have a problem with shift-selection.
If I select a region with my mouse, the text is highlighted and automaticaly saved on to the kill ring (I can yank it immediately).
With shift-selection, the text is highlighted but I have to manualy save the text (M-w) to be able to yank it.
Is there any way that shift-selection hightlights the text AND saves it onto the kill ring ?

Answer 1

Selecting text with the mouse does not place anything onto the kill ring by default (it copies it to the X clipboard).

There are various ways in which you can customise how Emacs interacts with the clipboard. See:

C-hig (emacs) Cut and Paste RET

Is there any way that shift-selection hightlights the text AND saves it onto the kill ring ?

I’m not sure that there’s any way to detect that you’ve stopped selecting things, but you could perhaps advise handle-shift-selection to set a temporary post-command-hook to run a custom function to place the region in the clipboard (and remove the post-command-hook).

Edit: Hang on, what you describe is exactly what happens for me in Emacs 24.1 on Ubuntu.

If I shift-select some text in Emacs and then middle-click the mouse in any application, I paste the selected text.

Try testing when running emacs -Q

Edit 2: Ah, but you didn’t mean the mouse, did you?

How about this?

(defvar my-shift-selection-in-progress nil)
(make-variable-buffer-local 'my-shift-selection-in-progress)

(defadvice handle-shift-selection
  (before my-shift-selection-to-kill-ring-advice)
  "Automatically copy shift-selected text to the kill ring.

If `interprogram-cut-function' is non-nil, also save the text for a window
system cut and paste.

See `my-shift-selection-to-kill-ring'."
  (when (and shift-select-mode
             this-command-keys-shift-translated
             (not my-shift-selection-in-progress))
    (add-hook 'post-command-hook 'my-shift-selection-to-kill-ring nil t)))

(ad-activate 'handle-shift-selection)

(defun my-shift-selection-to-kill-ring ()
  "Post-command callback for my-shift-selection-to-kill-ring-advice."
  (if this-command-keys-shift-translated
      (kill-new (filter-buffer-substring (region-beginning) (region-end))
                my-shift-selection-in-progress)
    (remove-hook 'post-command-hook 'my-shift-selection-to-kill-ring t))
  (setq my-shift-selection-in-progress this-command-keys-shift-translated))