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Comment by networkadmin

12 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.

9 comments

networkadmin

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doubled112  12 hours ago

Having two separate clipboard buffers is a feature I intentionally use.

  • m132  9 hours ago

    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.

  • SkiFire13  11 hours ago

    https://xkcd.com/1172/

    • jolmg  7 hours ago

      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

      1 reply →

garciansmith  12 hours ago

You can unify the middle mouse selection and the regular clipboard in KDE if you wish. Personally I find keeping them separate very convenient.

  • jolmg  11 hours ago

    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.