Re: Clipboard periodically breaks

[Reinier Post <rp@win.tue.nl>]

On Thu Sep 26 20:35:21 2013, matt@codespunk.com (Matt D.) wrote:
> Jon,
> 
> Thanks for looking into this. I can confirm that your changes
> correct the issue where highlighting next would cause arbitrary
> pastes to occur. Good work!
> 
> I also concede that there does not seem to be a good solution to
> transparently fix the two-to-one clipboard issue; as XWin may indeed
> be able to interpret calls to X's two clipboards, there wouldn't be
> any reasonable way for it to identify which clipboard is actually
> being used.

I'm reading this wich much interest: for me, too, copy-pasting
between Windows applications and Cygwin xterms to break after some time,
and this has been happening for a year or so.

I'm not aware of doing anything special to cause it to break,
but the only way I know how to fix it is to restart X.
This is with recent Cygwin packages on Windows 7.

I haven't tested with a newer build of the X server.

> However, an environment variable that tells it which clipboard to
> use would provide an immediate solution and be used used on a
> per-application basis. For example, I can use aliases when launching
> programs:
> 
> $ xclip=clipboard1 gedit $@ (monitor only clipboard 1)
> $ xclip=clipboard2 gedit $@ (monitor only clipboard 2)
> 
> No option would indicate that both clipboard 1 and clipboard 2 would
> be handled as they are now.
> 
> I'm not familiar with X programming but I'm assuming here that it
> would be possible for xclip to read from a particular process's own
> environment (rather than xclip's own) while processing a clipboard
> event to do this.
> 
> What do you think?

As an interested bystander, I have no doubt that that type of
specific solution to specific clipboard interaction problems can
possibly work, but using them will require detailed knowledge of how
the X and Windows clipboards interact.

My question is different: is it possible to implement the interaction
in such a way that a user such as me, who is not aware of any subtleties,
can get consistency, in the sense that all copy-paste actions between
X an Windows that work when X is started continue to work in the same way
for the duration of the session?

> Matt D.

-- 
Reinier Post
TU Eindhoven

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