A quick reference to… clipboards

One area of desktop Linux that causes some confusion to those more familiar with Windows is the clipboard handling. After all, it’s simple, isn’t it? You have a clipboard that you can copy to and paste from – what more could there be?

Well, another clipboard for a start. There is the primary clipboard, which behaves as you would expect, plus the X selection clipboard. Select some text in one window, move the mouse elsewhere and press the middle button and the text is immediately copied. This is simple and very handy, but it is a different clipboard from the one used by standard cut and paste options.

This will bite you when you select some text and then try to paste it with Ctrl+v, or copy text with Ctrl+c and try to paste with the middle mouse button. If you have a clipboard manager, like

Copyq or KDE’S Klipper, you can transfer data between the two, as well as being able to access your clipboard’s history to retrieve previously copied data. Incidentally, if your mouse does not have a middle button, it is usually emulated by pressing left and right buttons together.

Copying from a terminal is slightly different, because Ctrl+c has a very different function there, so the standard clipboard keyboard shortcuts need Ctrl and Shift together. You can also use the

xclip command to copy the output of a command or the contents of a file:

$ somecommand | xclip

$ xclip -selection clipboard

The first example copies the output of the command to the selection clipboard, while the second copies the contents of a file to the system clipboard instead.