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Geoff 42

Member

Registered: 2016-12-15

Posts: 461  

Copy and Paste the traditional way

Ever since I first started using X on Unix, I have used the left mouse button to select an area of text and the middle button to paste it in. These days I have to click down on the scroll wheel for the paste, but I do have to be a bit careful not to scroll at the same time!

This has worked fine for decades. Recently, however, it stops working. This does not seem to be a complete break. I had wondered whether it might be that the battery in my mouse (Logitek M325) might be flat and I have replaced it, but the copy and paste does seem to stop working. I have now updated to Daedalus and copy/paste does work most of the time, but does seem to stop sometimes.

When this is not working, I can use the edit facility in those programs that provide it, to copy and paste, but this does not help with e.g. my rxvt terminal windows.

I have recently noticed a new feature, that when I try and paste into rxvt some text which includes a new line, a little message appears at the bottom of the window asking if I mean to paste in control characters. I don't think that this co-incided with the upgrade.

Does anyone have any ideas of what might be going on here?

Geoff

PedroReina

Member

From: Madrid, Spain

Registered: 2019-01-13

Posts: 267  

Website

Re: Copy and Paste the traditional way

Does anyone have any ideas of what might be going on here?

First things first, I'd check the hardware (I've been there a lot of times). My first step would be checking with xev if the mouse if firing correct events.

Camtaf

Member

Registered: 2019-11-19

Posts: 408  

Re: Copy and Paste the traditional way

Alternative to middle wheel pasting is both left & right buttons together....

Geoff 42

Member

Registered: 2016-12-15

Posts: 461  

Re: Copy and Paste the traditional way

My first step would be checking with xev if the mouse if firing correct events.

Copy and paste is currently working and xev reports :-

left = button 1
click on wheel = button 2
right = button 3
scroll up = button 4
scroll down = button 5
click wheel left = button 8
click wheel right = button 9

I do have a similar mouse plugged into my laptop and will try swapping them over when this one stops working, after testing with xev.

Alternative to middle wheel pasting is both left & right buttons together....

That rings a bell, but is not currently working for me. xev reports button 1 and button 2 being pressed.

Thank you for your ideas

Geoff

Geoff 42

Member

Registered: 2016-12-15

Posts: 461  

Re: Copy and Paste the traditional way

Sorry, that should read button 1 and button 3 being pressed, when I press left & right simultaneously.

Geoff 42

Member

Registered: 2016-12-15

Posts: 461  

Re: Copy and Paste the traditional way

On reading the man page for rxvt, I noticed the other sequence for copy and paste was to select the area with the left button and then copy it with <alt><ctl>c and paste it with <alt><ctl>v. While this is necessary in rxvt, some programs are resistant to <ctl>c and thus I can use <ctl>c to copy from Claws and then paste it into rxvt with <alt><ctl>v.

The message which I have recently started to get in rxvt is :-

Pasting 1 control characters, continue? (y/n)

highlighted in yellow. This appears when there is a new line lincluded in the copied text.

Geoff

Nietz

Member

Registered: 2023-12-16

Posts: 13  

Re: Copy and Paste the traditional way

Good Morning Geoff,

Do you have any rxvt extensions installed?  It is possible that one plugin, confirm-paste, is configured to enable this paste prompt functionality. See this link for documentation on the perl plugin's page: https://github.com/exg/rxvt-unicode/blo … firm-paste and the urxvt-confirm-paste manpage.

Cheers

Geoff 42

Member

Registered: 2016-12-15

Posts: 461  

Re: Copy and Paste the traditional way

Thank you for the confirm-paste info. I had a quick look at rxvt-unicode using Synaptic and it does indeed list the file

/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/urxvt/perl/confirm-paste

amongst the installed files and this is confirmed with ls. I wonder whether this is new, as I have not noticed this effect before.

Thank you

Geoff

Last edited by Geoff 42 (2023-12-18 11:02:15)

Geoff 42

Member

Registered: 2016-12-15

Posts: 461  

Re: Copy and Paste the traditional way

As I looked through the man page for rxvt-unicode, I found out that in rxvt you can do the paste part with <shift><insert>. This is probably easier than trying to click on the mouse wheel without scrolling at the same time.
I tried copy and paste from Claws to emacs, using <shift><insert>, but this did not use the text I had just selected, but some text from another buffer.

Geoff

delgado

Member

Registered: 2022-07-14

Posts: 157  

Re: Copy and Paste the traditional way

Just thinking: The confirm-paste add-on may have been useful in former times, where "paste something with a newline character" lead to direct execution. But this is not the case anymore; pressing the [ENTER] key seems mandatory in bash.