Clipboad manager for my issues

Question

Hi!
I am using xfce, and my problem is that if you copy text content with mouse for example in a browser window, and then I would paste it to a terminal window (Terminator), I can't do it with usual Shift+Insert, because the so called primary selection and the "clipboard" are not syncronized. I searched in this topic, and I have found a program called "autocutsel", but it causes a different problem: I will be unable to select a text and delete/overwriting it by pasting the clipboard content, because the selected text is automatically copied to the clipboard, and I don't want to do this. I would like to use only one clipboard, as I get accustomed to in Windows years... What should I install to achieve this? Is there a clipboard manager program/ daemon which can be programmed, and I can assign actions to clipboard events? Then I could do it, because when clipboard / primary selection changes, I could run "xsel" with the appropriate options.
My other problem: sometimes I would like to use multiple clipboards, and paste different text content by different key combinations. For example when I got a lot of messages on a dating site, and I would like to answer them, my answers are already written and saved in a text document. I would copy them to different clipboards, and I would paste them according to the actual message. Maybe there is such a good clipboard manager which can support both task I delineated above.
Last edited by Bailando (2014-07-05 19:41:34)

Answer 1

There are actually 8 (or so) default selections in X.  Most people only every use PRIMARY and CLIPBOARD.  While applications can do various other things with them, the standard and expected behavior is that whenever text is selected with the mouse (often then highlighted or reversed text) it is placed in the PRIMARY selection.  When a menu option like "copy" or "cut" is used, the copy/cut content is then placed in the CLIPBOARD selection.
Shift-Ins or Shift+middle-mouse-button will paste the PRIMARY selection.  An application must request the CLIPBOARD selection for pasting (often through a menu option to "paste").
From what you describe as the desired behavior, it seems the easiest would simply be to remap/rebind the shift+insert combination to call `xsel -b` and not worry about syncing anything.
EDIT: of course if one of the existing clipboard managers will do a one-way sync without much hassle, that might be easiest - I've never used any of clipboard management tools aside from xsel, and I rarely use that one.
Last edited by Trilby (2014-07-10 13:26:33)