Everytime the Link feature is clicked, it overwrites the clipboard snip with what was selected in the Note. I cannot think of a single instance where this a useful behavior. (There’s a bug report.)
Since the link editor is even more modal than usual, you cannot even rearrange Gramps Windows to see reference or copy new text into the clipboard.
If you had a URL in the copy buffer, hopefully the browser is still open and you can copy it again.
Most of the time, the link editor shows handle information for new links… which gibberish to the average user. They’re used to IDs.
That’s bass-akwards. Every other linking interface seems to do something like here in Discourse’s linker. It SHOWS the highlighted term in the dialog as a reminder of what your doing:
Gramps should be able to pass the highlight as a parameter instead of a clipboard anyway. It shouldn’t co-opt a User workspace.
And shouldn’t it pass the “highlighted term” (as a parameter, not a clipboard item) to a pre-populate the Find (without actually applying the constraint) when loading the Select Object dialog?
Instead of overwriting the copy buffer, it uses the highlighted text like a reminder/title in the 1st row. The search magnifying glass searches the category with that text as a parameter.
beside the ID are buttons to allow adding a new, or selecting a different object. (similar to the button on the 1st row except that it doesn’t search 1st)
beside the title, a button opens the ID’d object in that category’s Object Editor. And (if the dialog ever becomes semi-modal) this could be a landing zone for drag’n’drop of an object from the Clipboard or View. Since linking is relatively insensitive to Category, dropping Primary objects could force the Link Type to change automatically to match. (Ref and Text objects dragged from the clipboard should be ignored.)
beside the internal address is a dimmed clipboard Paste button. And when the link type is Internet, the label changes to External Address and the Paste button is available.
