Le 18/11/2020 à 10:11, Ludovic Bellière a écrit : > Whenever you select something, the content is then sent to the PRIMARY > selection. As such, selecting text would be the equivalent of MS > Windows's CTRL-C. Content is then accessed using the middle mouse > button. > > Whenever the user specifically request the content to be copied, with > CTRL-C, the content would then be sent to the CLIPBOARD selection. > Accessed then using CTRL-V. > > There can be any number of selections (ie. buffers containing your > data), but we usually needs to take care of only three: PRIMARY, > SECONDARY and CLIPBOARD. > > Writing this email, whenever I select some text it then becomes > available across all windows through the click of the middle mouse > button so long the text remains selected. If I want a more permanent > buffer, I would then need to use CTRL-C. > > See: https://tronche.com/gui/x/icccm/sec-2.html#s-2.6 > > There is another behavior called cut buffers. Cut buffers store data > regardless of the state of the window from which it originates. These > behave like the PRIMARY selection, selecting text would then send the > content to a cut buffer. I believe terminals, such as xterm, make use > of the cut buffer mechanism. The guake terminal, however, does not and > uses the PRIMARY selection instead without clearing it after the text > is no longer highlighted. > > See: https://tronche.com/gui/x/icccm/sec-3.html#s-3 > >> I've tried pastebin managers in the past, but they seemed to make >> things worse. >> >> If anybody knows of a pastebin manager (but not associated with KDE) >> that makes cut and paste on any Linux X (not associated with a >> specific wm/de (Window Manager/Desktop Environment)), please let me >> know. >> > That does not exists per say. The clipboard is managed by the X window > system for very good reason, one of them is to enable the copied > content to be shared between applications. The behavior of the > clipboard may be different depending on what takes ownership of it, > which is why you may have found different behavior with different set > of software. > > Different software can take ownership of the selections, and those > software can behave differently. For instance claws-mail will purge the > PRIMARY selection whenever I stop selecting text within the window, > where as guake will not. That can lead to some weird stuff. > > For instance: > - I select text within xterm -> sent to a cut buffer and PRIMARY > - Cut buffers are not available within claws mail, PRIMARY is. > - I select something in claws mail, PRIMARY gets cleared > - The content of the cut buffer is still available to xterm, so long > PRIMARY is empty. > > As for the clipboard manager, I use xfce4-clipman. It handle the CTRL-C > requests and store a history. Leaves the PRIMARY selection alone. There > is also a xclipboard, but that software changes the behavior of the > selections. > Thanks a lot for these detailed explanations, though it's missing how the SECONDARY is used.
A lot needs to be studied to understand the behaviour of cut/paste. Since most of us only use a finite number of applications, it therefore seems easier to rely on an empirical knowledge of the behaviour of each app. AFAIR , Windows doesn't allow cut/paste across different applications. But I confess I didn't use this OS for decades. -- Didier _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng