[ILUG] nifty X11 cut-and-paste tricks

[Justin Mason]

(jm: I'm hoping someone will come up with vim support ;)

http://zgp.org/~dmarti/blosxom/tips/eval-button.html :

  "eval" button

  (updated 4 Mar 2005: updated clipboard version to "copy" instead of "cut")

  Jef Raskin wrote

      All that is really needed on computers is a "Calculate" button or
      omnipresent menu command that allows you to take an arithmetic
      expression, like 248.93 / 375, select it, and do the calculation
      whether in the word processor, communications package, drawing or
      presentation application or just at the desktop level.

  Fortunately, there's a blue "Access IBM" button on this keyboard that
  doesn't do anything. So, I configured tpb to make "Access IBM" do this:

  perl -e 'print eval `xsel -o`' | \
  xsel -i && xte 'key Delete' 'mouseclick 2'

  (That is, get the contents of the X primary selection, run it through a
  Perl "eval", put the result back into the X primary selection, then fake a
  delete and paste.)

  Here's a version that uses the X clipboard selection instead.

  xte 'keydown Control_L' 'key c' 'keyup Control_L' && \
  perl -e 'print eval `xsel -b -o`' | xsel -b -i  && \
  xte 'keydown Control_L' 'key v' 'keyup Control_L'

  This one seems to work better in gedit.

  So, say you're filling out a web form and you want to buy sqrt(9) pcHDTV
  cards. All you have to do is fill in the expression, select it, and press
  "Access IBM". Yippee! One, two, three units of soon-to-be-illegal,
  better-buy-them-now freedom-compatible hardware.

  If you want to do this, besides tpb, you'll need xsel and xte, which is
  part of xautomation. If you don't have an unused button, you could also
  set up a binding in your window manager or build a big red outboard USB
  "eval" button or something.