Comment by networkadmin
14 hours ago
I love Linux, but the cut and paste situation is really terrible. The middle mouse paste isn't a problem for me--it's that there are two separate "clipboard" buffers, which just causes all sorts of problems.
14 hours ago
I love Linux, but the cut and paste situation is really terrible. The middle mouse paste isn't a problem for me--it's that there are two separate "clipboard" buffers, which just causes all sorts of problems.
Having two separate clipboard buffers is a feature I intentionally use.
Yup, both have their uses. If you use a clipboard manager or have the clipboard synchronized between devices/remote desktops/VMs, the primary selection comes in handy for stuff you don't exactly want saved to disk, crossing VM boundaries, or transmitted over the network. I use middle-click pasting primarily for its separate buffer.
You and I both.
https://xkcd.com/1172/
Except it's not a bug that found use. It's intentional behavior. From https://specifications.freedesktop.org/clipboard/latest/:
> The rationale for this behavior is mostly that [having a unified clipboard] has a lot of problems, namely:
> - inconsistent with Mac/Windows
> - confusingly, selecting anything overwrites the clipboard
> - not efficient with a tool such as xclipboard [(tool that maintains a history of specifically CLIPBOARD; it would be messy to keep a history of all selections)]
> - you should be able to select text, then paste the clipboard over it, but that doesn’t work if the selection and clipboard are the same
> - the Copy menu item is useless and does nothing, which is confusing
> - if you think of PRIMARY as the current selection, Cut doesn’t make any sense since the selection simultaneously disappears and becomes the current selection
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You can unify the middle mouse selection and the regular clipboard in KDE if you wish. Personally I find keeping them separate very convenient.
There are a number of DE-independent clipboard managers that can do that as well as other features, like keeping a clipboard history so you can copy in series then paste in series, or having keyboard shortcuts transform the clipboard contents by way of a command, so you can e.g. copy some multi-line text then paste it as a single line joined by spaces.
I use "autocutsel" to synchronize the cut buffer and clipboard in X. Not sure what Wayland might need to do this or if it even has a similar concept.
I love select to copy and middle-click to paste.
https://www.nongnu.org/autocutsel/