Comment on I don't like the Linux clipboard situation
PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 3 days agoYou should try Helix, it’s vi with some of the odd decisions removed and updated to adapt to some of the evolution (and stupidness, q.v.) that has happened in the Linux ecosystem but still true to a lot of the good stuff that vi does.
I, too, like being able to both middle-click and to hit Ctrl-V. IDK how you got that I was unhappy about that part. What I don’t like is being unable to hit the “copy text” button in my web browser and then do anything at all to get that text into a terminal session, if for some crazy reason I might want to do that. But why, you ask, would I even need to do such a thing? I can always go back, carefully highlight this massive block of text character by character, like some kind of perfectly sensible person, and then carry the text over back to my terminal and middle-click it, like a person carrying an overflowing jug of water through a dance floor. You know what? Forget it, I can’t even remember what I was complaining about.
MacOS, out of all the environments, actually has this worked out perfectly. Not only do they have only a single clipboard, but they have a very consistent set of keyboard shortcuts that supports both a modern and a Unixy workflow. You can use Ctrl-A (go to beginning of line), Ctrl-C (kill program), Ctrl-K, Ctrl-E, all the standard bash/emacs/terminal keyboard editing shortcuts, and they all do what you would expect if you’re a Unix person. But, you can also use Cmd-A (select all), Cmd-C (copy), and so on, and all those shortcuts do exactly what you would expect if you’re a Windows person. Every single program supports all of them consistently, and so it’s pretty easy to get done whatever you would want to get done whatever your accustomed workflow is.
And then there’s Wayland over here like “NOT TODAY MOTHER FUCKER, THAT’S AN EDITOR RUNNING ON A DIFFERENT SERVER, JUST GIVE UP AND TYPE THE PASTE BACK IN BY HAND YOU FUCKING LOSER, YEAH THAT’S RIGHT, DID I STUTTER”
CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 2 days ago
Uhh, so I’ve been on Xfce for a while, and I’ve never seen this. When did the madness start?
You mean into a GUI shell emulator, right? (I didn’t even know there was a clipboard that functions when not in a graphical session, otherwise)
PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 2 days ago
Correct. Go to github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy.git, click on “Code” and then the little “copy please” button next to the address of the .git URL, and then go to a terminal and middle-click. My money is on it not working if you haven’t set up some sort of special mojo for it to work. And, of course, there are things where the amount of text is large and not easy to find the end of quickly among the other boundaries between it and other things on the page…
CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 2 days ago
Nope, that works fine for me. Do you hate this enough to switch?
PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 2 days ago
I mean it works for me now, see my comment where I talked about some of the unreasonably extensive configuration I had to do to make it work the way I wanted. At this point I have CLIPBOARD automatically synced to PRIMARY, so I can always copy something and then middle-click and I’ll get it. And I still have nice behavior that Linux generally makes possible (being able to copy and paste out of terminals even if I’m scrolling around on the thing within the terminal while I’m doing it). Now if someone can just teach Ubuntu what
xterm-kitty
as the terminal setting means, when I have to ssh to an Ubuntu machine, I can finally be happy.