xwinclip: unable to paste INTO a highlighted area (linux -> linux and windows -> linux)
Harold L Hunt II
huntharo@msu.edu
Sun Apr 13 23:57:00 GMT 2003
Jay,
That is just the way that X is designed. Stupid? Yes. When you
select text, you copy it into the buffer, displacing whatever you had
just copied before.
Harold
Jay Smith wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I know that "copy highlighting" has been discussed to death, but I have
> not found any recent references to the problem of, WITHIN LINUX or from
> WINDOWS TO LINUX, not being able to do a copy and *then* highlight an
> area and *paste* into the highlighted to *replace* the highlighted text.
>
> If I copy/paste from Linux -> Windows95, it works properly, I can
> highlight source text and then highlight the target and paste into the
> target thus replacing the highlighted text in the target with the source
> text.
>
> However, if I am copy/pasting between two LINUX applications, i.e.
> Mozilla Mail, anytime I highlight anything, that goes into the "buffer".
> If I highlight target text that I want to replace with source text I
> have copied, the source text that I originally copied is gone and
> instead the text in the target is in the buffer.
>
> If I am copy/pasting from Windows95 -> Linux I also have the problem.
>
> The bottom line is that for linux -> linux copy/paste, xwinclip *breaks*
> the copy/paste behavior in Linux. Without xwinclip, I can highlight
> target text and replace it with source text that I have copied by
> highlighting and doing a ctrl-c.
>
> I find it odd that this problem has not *seemed* to get more attention.
> 95% of the copy/paste that I do involves a) copying source text, b) then
> highlighting another block of text (i.e the target), and c) pasting the
> copied source text into the highlighted target.
>
> Because of this problem, I have to reverse the order of things (not
> natural) and delete the text in the target area before pasting into the
> target area. If I am doing repeated pastes of the same content, perhaps
> into multiple documents, this is a huge pain.
>
> I understand that xwinclip seems to use the concept that any text
> highlighted is automatically copied. I suppose that the reason for this
> has to do with various applications using different ctrl and alt
> keystrokes for their own purposes. For example, a ctrl-c in a kshell
> cancels the command line.
>
> However, there really should be a way to deal with this problem. Is
> there and I have just missed it?
>
> Maybe if some ctrl-alt-shift, etc., key was held down while
> highlighting, that action would block xwinclip from putting the
> highlighted text into the buffer.
>
> My environment is:
>
> Windows 95 running Cygwin ....
> XFree86-base 4.2.0-1
> -lib 4.2.0-5
> -xserv 4.2.0-28 (that's what it says: 28)
> -xwinclip 4.2.0-8
>
> I am using XDM to get to RedHat Linux 8 which has been kept up to date,
> using up2date, to just BEFORE the point a couple weeks ago that they
> screwed things up with the glib disaster. (I feel like I have been
> Microsoft'ed; my faith in RH has been devastated.)
>
> Any ideas/suggestions or fixes? If more environment info is needed, please
> advise.
>
> Jay
>
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