[Annoyances] X-Windows Copy & Paste

[John Meacham]

On Tue, Aug 19, 2003 at 07:46:27AM +0200, Marko Macek wrote:
> Jason Gurtz wrote:
> >>This is another REALLY BIG Linux annoyance.  I'm a desktop kind of guy, 
> >>and I like to cut/copy and paste all day long.  But Linux has really 
> >>really bad cut/copy and paste [...]
> >
> >Actualy, Linux and other UNIXen have pretty good cut/copy and paste
> >*provided* you have a 3 button mouse.  Both in X and using GPM in the
> >console, simply selecting text with the first button copies that into
> >the buffer and third button pastes.
> 
> This is not cut/copy/paste. It works differently from Ctrl+XVC and is 
> completely separate from it. It really annoys me when people advertize 
> this as cut&paste.
> 
> Technical explanation here:
> 
> http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/clipboards-spec/clipboards.txt
> 
> It would be really good if there was a standard way to disable this 
> behavior globally for all applications.
> 
> There are some important applications that confuse this, like xterm
> (still the best terminal emulator). It uses Shift+Ins to paste primary 
> selection and doesn't support the clipboard at all.

actually xterm  is extremely configurable in this regard:

this (in your .Xresources) turns off button 2 pastes and allows
Shift-Insert - Paste PRIMARY
Control-Insert - Paste CLIPBOARD if it exists, else PRIMARY

XTerm*VT100.Translations: #override\n<Btn2Up>:ignore()\n\
     Ctrl <KeyPress> Insert:insert-selection(CLIPBOARD, PRIMARY)

adding a keybinding to copy the current PRIMARY selection to the
CLIPBOARD (like an explicit cut in other apps) would be trivial.
Xresoursces are quite the powerful tool.

perhaps these should be added as default bindings? (not the getting rid
of middle button, but the CLIPBOARD actions) the fact that xterm
can only work on PRIMARY by default does seem like a misfeature.

        John



-- 
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John Meacham - California Institute of Technology, Alum. - john at foo.net
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