[ILUG] X clipboard weirdness

[Dermot McGahon]

On Sun, 18 Apr 2004 21:21:49 +0100, Timothy Murphy 
<tim at birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie> wrote:

> Could you quote one sentence from this paper then
> that explains in normal English what is meant by any of these terms?

For gods sake.

The paper does exactly what it says and explains in a thousand
words or less how X selection works.

If you need a better explanation why not read more around the
subject.

You're now complaining about two things. KDE bugs, and computer
science 'verbiage'.


> Thanks, I'll try that.
> But I actually know what is happening.
> Select works, but pasting does not work in many KDE and GNOME 
> applications.

Ok, you know what is happening, but you don't know why, and
instead of finding out yourself you are either, expecting me
to tell you why, or are content to complain about the situation
without doing anything about it.


> There are many other applications it doesn't work for,
> eg I was compiling the kernel today, with "make xconfig",
> and tried pasting in the name of the config file I wanted to use.
> As I expected, nothing came up until selected on the Clipboard.

Can I check something?

You're selecting text using the mouse, and then using either
the middle mouse button or button-1/button-2 pressed together
to paste?

If you're trying to use ctrl-v to paste the selection then
read the links below where the KDE developers explain how
broken their implementation of the clipboard was.

They attempted to fix this for KDE3, but as I don't use KDE,
I don't know how successful this has been.

If you are mixing selections and clipboard, it's a known bug,
generally within KDE, that is being worked on. If you are
sticking to standard X primary selection, it's a bug within
Konsole.

Either way, it's a bug.

On a quick search, it looks like KDE2 and Klipper are broken:

http://dot.kde.org/1013076354/1013106565/
http://dot.kde.org/1006384488/1006476851/1006480500/

X selection has been working for me and millions of others,
for years. Problems starting arising when the desktop
environments implemented clipboards and failed to write to
the specs. They got a clipboard working, but failed to address
all the interactions with the standard methods which were
working just fine prior to that. Hence the hundreds to emails
to mailing lists and rightfully so.

I sympathise that this isn't working the way you want it to
just at the moment. Maybe KDE4 will be better.


Dermot.
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