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Comment by jancsika

3 days ago

It's sad how both the author of the FF bug and Gnome merge fail Chesterton's fence. One calls it "very weird" and the other blithely calls it an "X11ism."

My understanding is it's a cross-DE way to highlight text in a terminal and paste it into the browser, useful for a debugging search and/or bug reports.

Is there a more common way of achieving this that works across all terminal apps and browser types in Linux?

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jancsika

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proaralyst  3 days ago

It's a feature of X (so works in any app running in X, not just FF and your terminal emulator). Wayland changed clipboard behaviour (along with many other things) and decided the selection clipboard was too large a security hole to keep. It's pretty useful though, so Gnome added it back, on top of Wayland. It's still a large security hole though!

Separately, PuTTY has a similar mechanism for copy, though this goes in the normal Windows clipboard.

  • palata  3 days ago

    > It's still a large security hole though!

    May I ask how it is a large security hole and how it is larger than the "Ctrl+C" clipboard? Genuinely interested.

    • takluyver  3 days ago

      A web page with Javascript can see & send off something you paste into a text box as soon as it appears. So if you accidentally paste some confidential information, like a password, that's a security hole even if you notice and delete it straight away. This happens even for totally innocent reasons, like search-as-you-type.

      Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V copy and paste is not such a big issue because far more people are familiar with it, and it requires more deliberate actions on both sides (copying and pasting). So you're less likely to accidentally copy something around that you didn't mean to.

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