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Dealing with the Unix Copy and Paste Paradigm?

Posted by Cliff on from the it-works-well-enough-once-you-learn-how-to-use-it dept.

MolecularBear asks: "I grew up on Windows machines, using the ol' ctrl-c to copy and ctrl-v to paste. For the past few years I've been a hardcore Linux user, running it almost exclusively at home and at work. As I am sure you are all aware, highlighting text in Linux automatically performs a copy while the middle mouse button performs a paste. The Ctrl-c, Ctrl-v standard works in many applications, but not all. Lately I have begun to find the automatic highlight-copy to be annoying. As in, I'll highlight text to copy it, then realize I want to highlight a block of text for the purpose of deleting it. Of course, the second highlighting overwrites the first highlighting. I am curious about how other people accomplish their copy/paste needs. Any special setups, applications, or words of wisdom?"

3 of 1,125 comments (clear)

  1. Re:-1 Redundant by dijjnn · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    why do you put unix in parentheses after linux?

    darl? is that you?

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    ~dijjnn
  2. -1 troll/idiot/wrong by Ender+Ryan · · Score: 1, Flamebait
    The only thing you said that is true is that there is no way to copy/paste images using the X clipboard.

    The X clipboard is not broken, you just don't understand it. There are several posts explaining it already posted, two being my own, so I won't repeat it in its entirety. The short version is that middle+click and meta/control+c/v are two separate buffers, and people get confused by that. If someone didn't know anything about X, they would most likely never notice the middle+click buffer, sticking to control+c/v which nearly all new apps use as the default key bindings for copy/paste.

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    Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
  3. Re:Pasting urls by sirReal.83. · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    You are completely fucking clueless. If you don't want to use X selections (the left-/middle-click one - it is NOT a clipboard) you don't have to, and you'll never know they exist. If you want to use the "normal" clipboard, you can do that.

    That said, I use both on a regular basis. X selections are actually one of my favorite features of X, and I've only been using it for a little over a year. I come from Windows, and I love this "broken system." There's nothing to fix but the fact that GNOME and KDE have separate clipboards. Actually, it's fixed on my box (though I'm not sure how) already.

    Free Software is about choice. "Fixing" X selections would needlessly eliminate choice. You don't know what you're talking about.