Cut, Copy, Paste Nightmare

[Gordon Messmer]

Rickey Moore wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-05-30 at 13:56 -0400, David Cary Hart wrote:
> 
>> So in summary after copy or cut, I am never sure whether shift-insert
>> or the mouse-middle-button will paste the just cut text. Frequently,
>> neither works properly.
> 
> Using Oracle and Netscape we had to use Abiword in-between to cut & 
> paste at all. Copy from Netscape, paste to Abiword, copy from Abiword, 
> paste to Oracle. What a royal pain. It was explained to me, but I have 
> forgotten the reason. Linux will never make it to Joe Lunchbucket's 
> computer until it becomes resolved, and this problem goes back a LONG 
> way. It was 6 years ago when we were doing that procedure to copy, cut & 
> paste.  I feel your pain. :) Ric

The problem was mostly solved years ago.  The biggest amount of 
confusion came from the fact that KDE 2 used the wrong X selection for 
copy/paste, and therefore didn't interoperate with anything non-KDE.

And here's a statement that you probably never thought you'd see: The 
best explanation of this that I've seen was a slashdot comment.
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=109755&cid=9319130

So, basically, there are two clipboards in X.  If you select text with 
the mouse, you can paste it with the middle button.  If you use the 
"copy" menu item (or ctrl+c), you can paste it with the "paste" menu 
item (or ctrl+v).  As long as you don't try to mix the two, like 
expecting "paste" to insert something that you selected with the mouse, 
you should be fine.

Ctrl+Ins and Shift+Ins aren't real consistent, though.  Terminal 
applications tend to insert the contents of the primary selection on 
Shift+Ins, where other applications will insert the contents of the 
clipboard selection.

 From the original post, it's not clear where he's trying to copy from 
or too.  Clarification on that may help us explain why a particular 
application isn't behaving the way you'd expect.  However, there's 
nothing wrong or broken about X or its copy mechanisms.