Dealing with the Unix Copy and Paste Paradigm?

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?"

Comments

Pasting urls

[grahamsz]

I usually find you can just pick up the url by selecting it, then middle button drop it into the browser. That seems to work on konq, netscape, mozilla and firefox on both linux and solaris.

But i do feel your pain :)

Firefox and Konqueror should have a button for "Open the clipboard in a new tab".

Re:Pasting urls

[Martin Blank]

Firefox and Konqueror should have a button for "Open the clipboard in a new tab".

Agreed. While not a perfect solution, Clipboard Observer may be a possible way of dealing with this. It can get really intrusive, though, because it can end up opening tabs when you're copying a link to paste somewhere else, like in e-mail or IM. Worth a try, though.

On an unrelated note, the same author also has Tabbrowser Extensions, basically some really, really, REALLY useful alterations to how Mozilla and Firefox handle tabs. With it, you can do things that should (IMHO) be in the codebase, like re-ordering tabs, moving tabs in groups, moving tabs between windows, opening duplicate tabs (complete with the tab's page history), and (my favorite) undoing the closing of a tab. I've been saved on a number of occasions by this last feature. Very handy. The author should be getting more recognition.

Re:Pasting urls

[divirg]

No, I'm thinking of Diggler.

"Diggler is a small but powerful add-on for Mozilla, Netscape and Firefox. It adds a button next to the location bar which can clear the location bar..."

Similar, but without the keystrokes.

Re:Pasting urls

[lerouxt]

In KDE you can configure Klipper to either "Synchronize contents of the clipboard and the selection" or "Separate clipboard and selection".

Your choice.

Re:Pasting urls

[Anonymous Coward]

Option "AllowMouseOpenFail" "true" in your XF86Config. This is on by default on all linux distributions I've used recently, actually, so I'd be interested to know what distro you were using so it can be corrected.

Minor solution - Ctrl-K

[jmdjmd]

Just a small shortcut - Ctrl-K will (should!) erase the rest of the line, no need for highlighting it. Works wonders for clearing the URL bar :-).

Re:Common problem..

[GigsVT]

Whats more interesting is that sometimes what control+v pastes is different from what the middle-click pastes.

Yeah, there's basically two clipboards. The one when you just highlight something, and the one where you click "copy" in the menu.

The confusion comes when bugs in some programs confuse the two (or only implement one of them .. cough xchat cough). It's extremely hard to convince egotistical programmers that their clipboard behaviour is actually wrong and confusing to users.

-1 Redundant

[stratjakt]

It's always been broken.

And any mention of a possible solution brings down the wrath of nerds who want to keep unix as unintuitive and awkward as possible.

Besides the nuisance of what mouse click or keystroke you use to move text, it's not a clipboard like Windows uses, merely a text buffer.

Ie; it's only good for text. You cant copy/paste (and by extension drag and drop) files, bitmaps, etc uniformly between apps.

It's just another item in a laundry list of issues that are major to end users, but a low priority for hackers. Another speedbump on the road to Linux (unix) as a truly competitive desktop platform.

X copy/paste

[Too Much Noise]

Actually, there are 3 selections in X. How's that for confusing?

The current consensus on freedesktop.org is something along the lines of:

1. The primary selection is to be used for middle-click pasting.
   
2. The secondary selection is unused now
   
3. the clipboard selection is to be used for Windows-style copy/paste.
   

The problem is that some apps use only the primary selection for all copy/paste operations, so it can get confusing.

For more info, look here

the "universal standard"

[XO]

Is supposed to be the original Windows copy/cut/paste buttons:

Copy: Ctrl-Insert
Paste: Shift-Insert
(I can't remember what Cut is, I never use it.. probably ctrl-delete)

Then, sometime in the Win95 or Win98 era, Microsoft changed it to the less-intuitive and less-standard Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V.

And Microsoft was a member of the body of people/organizations that made Ctrl-Insert and Shift-Insert the standard.. then went and trashed it...

This is the CUA92 user interface universal standard, by the way.. and i'm a bit busy right now to do a google search for it, but I'm sure anyone interested could find it..

Re:Common problem..

[irix]

Yeah, there's basically two clipboards.

Yup. The best explanation I know of how this works from someone who would know :)

Excellent article on the subject

[toomim]

You should read this article: http://www.jwz.org/doc/x-cut-and-paste.html.

In a nutshell, there are TWO completely different clipboards implemented in X:

1. The "select->middle click" clipboard
2. And the "copy->paste" clipboard

These two clipboards do not affect or interact with each other.

Other OS's (like Windows) only have the second kind. Modern Unix applications (like anything based on GTK, QT, or Mozilla) support both clipboards simultaneously and independently.

Old X Windows applications like XTerm only support the first kind. This is why you can't copy from or paste into an XTerm using C-c and C-v.

So if you are using modern applications, you should always be able to use C-c and C-v. If you have to copy or paste something into an XTerm, you will have to select it and middle-click. The solution is to use a moderm terminal, like gnome-terminal, instead of XTerm.

If you read the article, you'll learn that there are actually three different clipboards in X (one of which is never used), and that Emacs and XEmacs then implement yet another fourth clipboard!

Also see the freedesktop.org reference.

Re:Pasting urls - use Ctrl-L in Mozilla

[Peter McC]

In Mozilla and Firebird at least there is the very useful, but little-known shortcut Ctrl-L. This highlights the url bar but does *not* copy it to the clipboard. So when I'm in that situation I do Ctrl-L, delete, middle click.

Of course, the middle-click on the page body works too, as long as you don't have to edit the URL. Ctrl-L is still super-handy if you want to type in an URL by hand or something.