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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
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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.
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Alternative to middle wheel pasting is both left & right buttons together....
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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
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Sorry, that should read button 1 and button 3 being pressed, when I press left & right simultaneously.
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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
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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
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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)
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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
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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.
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