Linux clipboard HELL

Heller_Barde · 2009-09-10 08:27:04

the problem is not that we have too many clipboards, and nobody wants to remove features. I simply meant that i think it's silly to overwrite primary selection by just selecting, because it happens so easily. I think it should be possible to have as many clipboards as you want, and have different shortcuts for all of them (or of course as before, no shortcut, just yank on selection, for people who like it that way)

It just seems silly that in the world of linux, where we have choice for practically everything, we're stuck with the archaic, rigid primary clipboard and a later introduced secondary clipboard.

cheers
Barde

PS: i gotta ask though: are the Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V shortcuts implemented through the x-server or the individual applications?

Rasi · 2009-09-10 09:04:55

Heller_Barde wrote:

the problem is not that we have too many clipboards, and nobody wants to remove features. I simply meant that i think it's silly to overwrite primary selection by just selecting, because it happens so easily. I think it should be possible to have as many clipboards as you want, and have different shortcuts for all of them (or of course as before, no shortcut, just yank on selection, for people who like it that way)
It just seems silly that in the world of linux, where we have choice for practically everything, we're stuck with the archaic, rigid primary clipboard and a later introduced secondary clipboard.
cheers
Barde
PS: i gotta ask though: are the Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V shortcuts implemented through the x-server or the individual applications?

afaik its done thru the toolkits

Willie Green · 2009-09-10 12:31:36

lolilolicon wrote:

Procyon, I guess your script will make Willie Green happy
Maybe, just in case, you should also point him to the dmenu-vertical patch/PKGBUILD? I found this one http://evaryont.me/dmenu-vertical-history.patch

Sadly, I'm just a newbie-user who is still too inexperienced in programming/scripting skills to try it out so quickly... But I certainly appreciate your efforts and I have this discussion bookmarked so that I can try it at my own pace as I figure out what I'm doing.

As I read this thread, I see that my lament for a well polished clipboard management app is somewhat different than the underlying linux clipboard issue that everybody else is talking about. So maybe it is those underlying issues that prevent similar apps from being developed for linux... I don't know, I'm obviously not a programmer. But I do remember that there seemed to be countless similar apps available in Windows, yet all I can find in linux seems horribly crude.

I honestly can't remember if the app I was using stored the text-clips as individual files, or if they were actually stored in some kind of database. But I certainly remember that any text-clip I cut, I could simply drop them into one of the empty slots, and I could even rename the slot to something more meaningful than whatever text appeared at the beginning of the clip. Then, once my library of clips were stored, all I had to do was click on whichever slot had the clip that I wanted, and it would automagically paste it for me. (and if I right-clicked on it, I could edit the clip if I wanted.)

It was an extemely handy utility that I used ALL the time...
I am totally puzzled and bewildered as to why similar linux apps seem so crude and undeveloped. Maybe there is something available in the linux world that I'm unaware of. But IMHO, it's a golden opportunity for some programmer or group of programmers who have the skill to write such a program for linux.

Oh, thanks again for the script!
I promise I'll give it a try as soon as I can.
It's just that I'm a newbie, and I take my time to be careful not to screw anything up. LOL!

zowki · 2009-09-10 12:34:40

I think the biggest problem is copying from firefox and pasting in urxvt. Anyone have any tips for that?

Willie Green · 2009-09-10 13:00:03

Willie Green wrote:

Sadly, I'm just a newbie-user who is still too inexperienced in programming/scripting skills to try it out so quickly... But I certainly appreciate your efforts and I have this discussion bookmarked so that I can try it at my own pace as I figure out what I'm doing.

It's pretty ironic, really.
If I was into script-writing and wanted to maintain a library of scripts, this is precisely the utility that I would use to store the scripts. Then I could simply pop-up the window and paste the script whenever I wanted. Much easier than opening an editor, then doing a "File, Open" then having to search through directories, subdirectories and filenames of all the different scripts I had somehow organized and stored on my system.

I am really befuddled why linux doesn't have clip manager apps like this.

EDIT:
Oh shoot.... now I've started to think about how I could use it to store dozens of different conky config files. No need to come up with a dozens of different filenames for the ones that I'm not currently using. But if I wanted to change my conky configuration to something different, I'd simply open ~/.conkyrc in an editor, delete everything, then paste whatever I had stored in my clipboard app. If I didn't like that configuration, then I'd simply do the same thing and paste a different one that I had stored, or go back to the original that I also stored in my clip manager.

And that's just conky...
just think of all the other config file variants I could us my little clip manager utility to store a "library".

Now I'm REALLY starting to get grumpy that I don't have this clip manager utility...

Last edited by Willie Green (2009-09-10 13:28:15)

Trent · 2009-09-10 13:59:35

I don't know about anybody else, but I do all kinds of things in Vim that I don't want interfering with my X clipboards. It is very common for me to delete a word or three and place them somewhere else in the document. I want to store those words *somewhere* after doing d3w, and I want them to stay there until I need them. But I won't be using them in any other application, and there's no need to put them on a clipboard for external use. Vim's anonymous buffer works fine, and I can use the X buffers when necessary as already mentioned (although it doesn't happen often).

smartboyathome · 2009-09-10 14:52:35

zowki wrote:

I think the biggest problem is copying from firefox and pasting in urxvt. Anyone have any tips for that?

Select, then middle click paste.Works for me.

pointone · 2009-09-10 15:27:59

Willie Green wrote:

If I was into script-writing and wanted to maintain a library of scripts, this is precisely the utility that I would use to store the scripts. Then I could simply pop-up the window and paste the script whenever I wanted. Much easier than opening an editor, then doing a "File, Open" then having to search through directories, subdirectories and filenames of all the different scripts I had somehow organized and stored on my system.
I am really befuddled why linux doesn't have clip manager apps like this.

What you describe is a filesystem, as I understand you... The reason Linux does not have apps like this is because it duplicates functionality... Poorly.

What happens when your "library" grows to over 100 snippets? Will you simply browse the whole list looking for something that resembles what you want? Or will entries be named?

How is opening an editor, opening a "clipboard" tool, searching for a relevant snippet, then pasting any easier than simply double-clicking an appropriately-named text file to open it in said editor?

Try Klipper in KDE and take a quick glance at xclip.

lolilolicon · 2009-09-10 15:42:18

Willie Green, Procyon's script mainly put everything you have in your X clipboard and primary selection into one place when triggered with -d option. And when triggered with -s option, you select from the entries displayed by demenu whichever you want, with up/down arrow keys and also keywords filtering. Once selected, the content of this selected entry is already in your X primary selection, which you can pasted with mouse middle-click.

It's good because it provides a way to merge X clipboard and primary selection, and displays them in such an order so that it's very convenient to select among recent entries. But it's not very suitable for very large database management imo.

Honestly, I don't think clipboard in its nature is for large database management. But whatever, you actually can put some snippets of text you have to type really often into your clipboard database, which in Procyon's script is /tmp/histdaemon directory. Say, your email address. You write it to a file called "99email", tigger the script with -s option, type 99email, enter, and that long long email address is in your middle-click. Just an example.

Procyon's usage of dmenu is really good. Though I don't think it's a good idea to mix clipboard with config file management, the method is quite reusable. Here is my example to show how you can switch between your configs easily.

Say I put all my conky config files in the directory ~/conky. I don't have dozens of them but only three. They're called conkyrc.red, conkyrc.green, and conkyrc.blue.

First, I creat a database with entries for all my conky configs by doing:

$ ls -1 ~/conky/* > ~/db

Then I write a little script so that I can select from them:

#!/bin/bash

db="$HOME/db"
sel=$(cat "$db" | dmenu -xs -rs -ni -l 15 -p 'select')
[ -n "$sel" ] && cp -f "$sel" ~/.conkyrc

The ~/.conkyrc I'm now using is a copy of conkyrc.red, but I feel kinda blue. So I just run this script and then, from the drop-down menu, select /home/me/conky/conkyrc.blue, and conky becomes as blue as I am and I'm happy.

You can do things like this with all your other configs if you like it this way.

By the way, if you'd like to try those scripts out, you should, if you haven't already, install a patched version of dmenu. You can install it by using the PKGBUILD from the dmenu-vertical package in AUR with the diff file replaced with the patch I talked about earlier. Of course you will have to adjust the PKGBUILD so that it uses this patch.

Last edited by lolilolicon (2009-09-10 15:49:55)

lolilolicon · 2009-09-10 15:47:55

smartboyathome wrote:

zowki wrote:
I think the biggest problem is copying from firefox and pasting in urxvt. Anyone have any tips for that?
Select, then middle click paste.Works for me.

Or shift-insert

Heller_Barde · 2009-09-10 16:53:56

pointone wrote:

Willie Green wrote:
If I was into script-writing and wanted to maintain a library of scripts, this is precisely the utility that I would use to store the scripts. Then I could simply pop-up the window and paste the script whenever I wanted. Much easier than opening an editor, then doing a "File, Open" then having to search through directories, subdirectories and filenames of all the different scripts I had somehow organized and stored on my system.
I am really befuddled why linux doesn't have clip manager apps like this.
What you describe is a filesystem, as I understand you... The reason Linux does not have apps like this is because it duplicates functionality... Poorly.
What happens when your "library" grows to over 100 snippets? Will you simply browse the whole list looking for something that resembles what you want? Or will entries be named?
How is opening an editor, opening a "clipboard" tool, searching for a relevant snippet, then pasting any easier than simply double-clicking an appropriately-named text file to open it in said editor?
Try Klipper in KDE and take a quick glance at xclip.

well, I think willie green has a point, it is a lot easier to have a selection of snippets at the ready with a keypress. if it's properly organized, this is much faster than opening a filemanager and looking for the file. because it can pop up and begone in 3 seconds, it wouldn't intrude as much into the workflow (imho). Of course, the backend could still be a folder somewhere with single snippets in single files. I might give that a shot at some point in time...

now to your point about poorly duplicating functionality. It wouldn't duplicate the functionality of a filesystem, it could use it as the back end and simply provide a very specialised frontend to said filesystem.

cheers
Barde

Willie Green · 2009-09-10 20:43:33

pointone wrote:

What you describe is a filesystem, as I understand you... The reason Linux does not have apps like this is because it duplicates functionality... Poorly.
What happens when your "library" grows to over 100 snippets? Will you simply browse the whole list looking for something that resembles what you want? Or will entries be named?
How is opening an editor, opening a "clipboard" tool, searching for a relevant snippet, then pasting any easier than simply double-clicking an appropriately-named text file to open it in said editor?
Try Klipper in KDE and take a quick glance at xclip.

Perhaps my explanation wasn't very clear, because to the best of my memory, the individual text-clips were not actually stored as individual files. I don't know how the programmers actually merged all the text-clip data for storage, but perhaps I gave the wrong impression by calling it a "database". But however the clips were stored, it was NOT as individual text files.

Here, I found the actual shareware utility that I used.
It was called "Classic Clipboard" and was published by www.easysoftwareuk.com.
But Easy Software UK sold the rights years ago to M8 Software which has evolved the product into their own Spartan Multi Clipboard

But the picture of the older "Classic Clipboard" version is probably easier to explain how it worked.

In the upper left corner of "Classic Clipboard", there were 9 actual clipboard slots.
These functioned pretty much the same as xclipboard or parcellite (and I assume Klipper, but I generally try to avoid KDE apps on my fluxbox system.)

Anyway, from those 9 clipboard slots, I could drag & drop any text clip into the (mostly) blue storage slots in the center 3 column x 32 row grid. And I could group and rename them anyway I wanted. So organizing the clips into different groups and subgroups for quick and easy access was very easy.

Then on the far right, there is a green column of 32 slots where I could further name different groups. This essentially gave me 32 different pages of 3x32 storage slots.
By my calculations, 32x3x32= 3072 storage slots for clips.
The published specs say > 90K slots, but I forget what additional features arrived at that figure. (Maybe it has something to do with what looks like drop-down menus in the very top row of the 3x32 grid. I don't recall those, so maybe it's a newer version of what I was using)
Anywaty, the basic layout that I just explained provided more than enough organized storage for my needs.

So picture this: anytime I wanted to cut and paste from the clipboard, "Classic Clipboard" would pop up, and I could not only instantly paste from the 9-slot actual clipboard (as I would xclipboard or parcellite), but a click on any of the permanent slots would instantly paste from them as well.

And if I had, for example, 762 different text clips stored (in whatever groups I had defined, I did NOT have 762 different text files scattered all over my hard drive to store those text clips.

Sorry if my previous explanation was confusing.
I hope this helps clarify how it actually worked.
I found it to be extremely useful for a wide variety of repetitive text clips that I pasted over and over and over again.

Willie Green · 2009-09-10 20:55:04

Heller_Barde wrote:

well, I think willie green has a point, it is a lot easier to have a selection of snippets at the ready with a keypress. if it's properly organized, this is much faster than opening a filemanager and looking for the file. because it can pop up and begone in 3 seconds, it wouldn't intrude as much into the workflow (imho). Of course, the backend could still be a folder somewhere with single snippets in single files. I might give that a shot at some point in time...

Yes Barde, that's exactly how I'm trying to explain it.
I hope my explanation of "Classic Clipboard" is more understandable.
And if I recall correctly, the individual clips were not stored in individual files.
I really don't know how they were stored, but I assume that the programmers somehow merged everything into some kind of indexed data file where it was compressed to help save disk space.... or something like that. LOL! Perhaps I should refrain from trying to guess how the program stored the text clips, because I really don't know all the different strategies available to programmers for doing something like that. But I am pretty certain that the individual clips were not stored as individual files.

Heller_Barde · 2009-09-10 23:56:04

Willie Green wrote:

But I am pretty certain that the individual clips were not stored as individual files.

doesn't matter really anyway because of exactly that kind of abstraction, this program was so incredibly useful, i imagine.

My idea has grown already a little. I have something in mind that would pop up when you start it (most useful of course as a shortcut) and then you'd have an interface to navigate either with the mouse or with numbers. and there would be groups and subgroups. It displayed only a grid of 9 at the time (or more, but 9 seems a sensible number) the numbers 1-9 would open the subgroups 1-9 respectively, so a familiar snippet could be retrieved by e.g. 1-5-3, or if one snippet is so immensely important (like e.g. the phrase "omg roflol!!!111"), you could give it it's own shortcut (which would call the program with options that retrieve this particular snippet)

as i said, I'll give it a shot as soon as i finished my current project.

cheers
Barde

skottish · 2009-09-11 04:50:30

urxvt can paste the Linux clipboard with Ctrl+Alt+MMB. It doesn't strip the newlines though, so the behavior is unpredictable.

lolilolicon · 2009-09-11 05:38:12

skottish... did you mean Ctrl+Alt+middle-click? My X screen just froze. The only thing that could be moved was the mouse. I had to go back to console to kill urxvtd........................... Everybody try it out

zowki · 2009-09-11 06:00:27

Yes, it is CTRL+ALT+Middle click and it doesnt actually strip new lines. This is so frustrating when I try to copy other peoples dotfiles from the internet. I'm on the verge of switching to gnome terminal that supports the secondary clipboard.

lolilolicon · 2009-09-11 06:59:29

zowki, I wonder how you make use of secondary selection (if you mean SECONDARY selection by 'secondary clipboard')?

Can you provide an example when you cannot copy others' dotfiles into urxvt?

xsytry · 2009-09-11 16:07:41

I decided to dump urxvt a few months back due to problems with clipboard.
Now I use terminal app from xfce. As all terminals based on VTE it supports clipbouard. It's shortcuts are crtl+shift+c and v. Now I am wondering why i decided to use urxvt in first place. I noticed no performace drop or anything like that after changing terminals. After some tuning they even look the same. (no borders, transparency, etc)
When i work with Vim, I copy and paste through + buffer - "+y copies to clipboard whatever is selected in visual mode and "+p pastes. No problems here.

andre.ramaciotti · 2009-09-11 16:25:52

When I used my PIII computer, there was a noticeable difference in speed when comparing VTE vs urxvt. There was also a huge difference in using urxvt with bitmap fonts and TTF fonts.

I'm with a newer computer now, but old habits die hard, I guess.

ugkbunb · 2009-09-11 16:51:57

xsytry wrote:

Now I am wondering why i decided to use urxvt in first place. I noticed no performace drop or anything like that after changing terminals. .

Weird I dropped terminal from xfce because it would take a 1-2 seconds to start up... I find urxvt starts up instantly or nearly so... It also supports true transparency (not sure if xfce's terminal does as well)... Also when I resized the xfce terminal the previous input would never resize properly... this is not the case in urxvt.

To fix the annoyin clipboard issue I just bind alt+grave to

xcut -o | xcut -selection clipboard

Then when I highlight text in urxvt that I want on my clipboard I hit that bind and tadah it is not on my primary and clipboard buffers. For some weird reason xsel has never worked for me -- the bind provided on the first page on this thread never worked for me. Prob something stupid I overlooked but xcut works fine so I have had no need to further debug it.

Last edited by ugkbunb (2009-09-11 16:53:47)

Willie Green · 2009-09-11 17:01:26

Heller_Barde wrote:

Willie Green wrote:
But I am pretty certain that the individual clips were not stored as individual files.
doesn't matter really anyway because of exactly that kind of abstraction, this program was so incredibly useful, i imagine.
My idea has grown already a little. I have something in mind that would pop up when you start it (most useful of course as a shortcut) and then you'd have an interface to navigate either with the mouse or with numbers. and there would be groups and subgroups. It displayed only a grid of 9 at the time (or more, but 9 seems a sensible number) the numbers 1-9 would open the subgroups 1-9 respectively, so a familiar snippet could be retrieved by e.g. 1-5-3, or if one snippet is so immensely important (like e.g. the phrase "omg roflol!!!111"), you could give it it's own shortcut (which would call the program with options that retrieve this particular snippet)
as i said, I'll give it a shot as soon as i finished my current project.
cheers
Barde

Well I certainly appreciate your interest in my obsession with this little app.
I realize that my gripe is tangential to the main topic of two different clipboards in linux.
But I had found it so hugely convenient and useful to have my clipboard pop-up fully integrated with a text-clip library when I was using Windows that I'm totally flabergasted and dumbfounded that such a basic utility doesn't seem to exist in the linux world. But then again, maybe something does and I just haven't discovered it yet.

Anyway, thanks again for your efforts and interest!
It's nice to know somebody who can see the usefulness of such a utility, and also has the creative skills to come up with a solution. Thank-you very, very much!!!!

Dieter@be · 2009-09-11 17:08:11

i used to use the clipboard manager in xfce but it borked when i copied binary data (eg a picture in a file manager).
not too relevant anymore as i use wmii now and no filemanager (other then MC sometimes), but anyway..

anyone used xclipboard? looks pretty convenient. i shall try it

XFire · 2009-09-11 17:23:22

I find it annoying when I copy a file name from XFCE to paste it somewhere else, and close the name dialogue and there too goes the text which I copied. That is one of the few Windows features that I miss.

Willie Green · 2009-09-11 19:13:01

Heller_Barde wrote:

doesn't matter really anyway because of exactly that kind of abstraction, this program was so incredibly useful, i imagine.

Yes, as a matter of fact, one of my most frequent uses for it was to post prewritten responses to repetitive questions that were posted on internet forums.

I'm sure we've all posted a well-thought-out answer to somebody's question at some time or other, complete with links directing them where to go for more specific reference information. Then 2 days, or 2 weeks, or 2 months later, you come across discussions where somebody different is asking the very same thing.

No problemo!
Simply popup your clipboard and paste the same answer you posted on the previous theads!!!

Very useful for oldtimers trying to give "generic" help to the newbies!
Of course, once it's pasted, you can also edit to address any unique concerns before you actually post. But I'm certain that anybody familiar with internet forums will quickly grasp the utility of not having to uniquely compose each and every post that you make.

If you like including taglines with your posts, you can also have a little library of different taglines from which you can quickly choose and paste whatever you want.

LOL! I can think of 1001 uses for text clips.
Some are very useful and productive, some are not.
It all depends on the individual and what kind of clips they find useful for their own purposes.

Arch Linux

#26 2009-09-10 08:27:04

Re: Linux clipboard HELL

#27 2009-09-10 09:04:55

Re: Linux clipboard HELL

#28 2009-09-10 12:31:36

Re: Linux clipboard HELL

#29 2009-09-10 12:34:40

Re: Linux clipboard HELL

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Re: Linux clipboard HELL

#31 2009-09-10 13:59:35

Re: Linux clipboard HELL

#32 2009-09-10 14:52:35

Re: Linux clipboard HELL

#33 2009-09-10 15:27:59

Re: Linux clipboard HELL

#34 2009-09-10 15:42:18

Re: Linux clipboard HELL

#35 2009-09-10 15:47:55

Re: Linux clipboard HELL

#36 2009-09-10 16:53:56

Re: Linux clipboard HELL

#37 2009-09-10 20:43:33

Re: Linux clipboard HELL

#38 2009-09-10 20:55:04

Re: Linux clipboard HELL

#39 2009-09-10 23:56:04

Re: Linux clipboard HELL

#40 2009-09-11 04:50:30

Re: Linux clipboard HELL

#41 2009-09-11 05:38:12

Re: Linux clipboard HELL

#42 2009-09-11 06:00:27

Re: Linux clipboard HELL

#43 2009-09-11 06:59:29

Re: Linux clipboard HELL

#44 2009-09-11 16:07:41

Re: Linux clipboard HELL

#45 2009-09-11 16:25:52

Re: Linux clipboard HELL

#46 2009-09-11 16:51:57

Re: Linux clipboard HELL

#47 2009-09-11 17:01:26

Re: Linux clipboard HELL

#48 2009-09-11 17:08:11

Re: Linux clipboard HELL

#49 2009-09-11 17:23:22

Re: Linux clipboard HELL

#50 2009-09-11 19:13:01

Re: Linux clipboard HELL

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