Arch Linux

phollox

Member

Registered: 2013-05-04

Posts: 61

PRIMARY clipboard manipulation

I was writing an email in Firefox. Needed to copy something from another email. Used PRIMARY, and it pasted with the format of the original mail. Ugly. The old Copy-Paste did the same thing (Ctrl C, Ctrl V). I looked online and there was this Shift Ctrl V to paste without format. But I was wondering if there could be a way to remove the format using the PRIMARY

I read about the Clipboard managers, but they seems to be mostly about history keeping. That feature is an overkill for me. And running a daemon, or an extra tray icon for this? Not the Arch way for me. And synchronizing the PRIMARY with the CLIPBOARD, and then using the Shift Ctrl V key to paste will work on Firefox, but not necessarily somewhere else (I think).

Thanks

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I divide by zero, multiple times per day. Also, I don't believe in tipping
Arch + i3wm (still learning)

Awebb

Member

Registered: 2010-05-06

Posts: 6,688

Re: PRIMARY clipboard manipulation

This is only the tip of the iceberg with X copy&paste. From the wiki:

It is also important to realize that according to the selection protocols, nothing is copied until it is pasted. For example, if you select some word in a terminal window, close the terminal and then want to paste it somewhere else, it will not work because the terminal is gone and the text has not been copied anywhere. If you want the word to be preserved after closing terminal window, consider installing a clipboard manager.

If you want to use those features heavily, you won't get around some sort of background process.