#Linux xclipboard mac os

#Linux xclipboard mac os

The heart of the problem for me is that I expected the X clipboard to behave like the clipboard on Windows or Mac OS X, but in fact X’s architecture is fundamentally different with two separate, yet equally important, clipboards in use. SECONDARY: ill-defined secondary selection.PRIMARY: traditionally used when a mouse selection is made, and pasted with middle-click or Shift-Insert.CLIPBOARD: traditionally used when text is copied and pasted from the edit menu, or via the Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V shortcuts in applications that support them.Three selections are defined in the ICCCM: CLIPBOARD, PRIMARY, and SECONDARY, each of which behaves like a clipboard in its own right: This is especially advantageous when there’s a slow connection to the X server, but this strength is also a weakness because data made available by an application disappears when it closes. Aside from being much more versatile and less volatile than cut-buffers, selections can also be faster because no data has to be sent on a copy (only on paste). When paste is called from another application, it requests data from the client that currently owns the selection. Rather than applications copying data to a global bucket, they request ownership of a selection. General consensus on cut-buffers was that they were the absolute salt of the Earth, so a new system was devised. The concept behind this now obsolete mechanism was that when text was selected in a window, the window owner would copy it to a property of the root window called CUT_BUFFER1, a universally owned bucket available to every application on the system. So what was the problem? To understand, we have to know a little more about the X clipboard. This was pretty frustrating–the clipboard’s importance in the everyday workflow really can’t be understated. Vim was even worse, even with set clipboard=unnamed it didn’t seem to play nice with anything else. Its behavior was utterly perplexing: I could select text and middle-click (or Shift-Insert) it most places I wanted, but I could only copy out of Chromium while pasting it seemed to only respect text that had been copied from itself. After getting used to Awesome’s key bindings, and throwing Luakit, Urxvt and Tmux into the mix, I got about as close to an optimized Linux build as I was likely to get.Įverything was perfect … except for one aspect: the clipboard. I elected not to use a display manager, instead preferring booting Awesome (an aptly named tiling window manager) via the startx script.

A few months back, I started running the lean Archlinux build that I’ve been using through to today.