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Comment by eitland | Hacker News Reader

What?

I never realized there was a problem with clipboards on mainstream Linux desktops?

Edit: after a couple of minutes of thinking I have found one single thing that isn't consistent: when copying and pasting from/to a terminal I have to use ctrl + shift + c or ctrl + shift + v (understandable since ctrl + c is used to terminate running programs).

Personally I guess cut, copy and paste should have been moved to Super + x/c/v since they are global os-level shortcuts, but it would break the habits of many of us so I guess that should be configurable as well.

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> I never realized there was a problem with clipboards on mainstream Linux desktops?

Highlight, middleclick, job done

This. The MacOS and Windows users have been missing on that powerful shortcut for years and now complain for a CTRL-SHIFT-C /V in terminal? Boohoo :)

That's the problem, I don't care about whatever they do, but when they remove stuff that the rest of us have been using for decades because windows doesn't do it, that is a problem.

Improvements shouldn't break things.

Tell that to the gnome team whose main design philosophy is to remove things people love then fight really hard to justify it.

I haven't used gnome since about 2000. Englightenment, IceWM, fluxbox, blackbox ring a bell, but it's been xfce for the last decade (well just the panel and the window manager)

Wasn't it right click?

I think that’s copy on some terminals, but I think the parent is talking about paste.

Except that doesn't work sometimes on Gnome Terminal. I've never been able to pin down exactly what causes it to break, but I have some machines where I have to do the key combo to make the copy and paste work and it's really annoying. Also, annoying is if you highlight something, then hit ctrl-shift-v and it puts in the text from the other cut buffer.

But the GP might be referring to the fact that copy and paste with anything but straight text is an outright shitshow on X. Compare to the copy and paste facilities from even ancient MacOS 6 it's downright stone age.

Yes, most people do not realize there is a problem. You have to use a different OS (Mac OS in my case) to discover how nice a working clipboard can be and to feel the pain when going back to Linux.

What problems do you have? I have been using KDE for the last few years and I never had a single problem with the clipboard.

I use Mac OS and (K)ubuntu about an equal amount nowadays, what's wrong with the handling on Linux DEs?

If anything I find OS X more annoying, as things like screenshots into the clipboard work far less reliably.

Not sure if you're joking. So many programs are broken on OS X. Mostly Electron ones like Teams.

That's the fault of (A) Electron and (B) developers who use Electron who (B.A) erroneously think that because Windows users don't mind having no menu bar then everybody else feels the same and (B.B) don't reimplement what Cocoa/Carbon give developers for free.

It's not macOS' problem if people seem to prefer writing mediocre cross-platform apps than proper, native apps with full support for macOS-specific features like system-wide automation, proper integration with the system pasteboard, Quick Look, accessibility features, etc.

Is it Gnome's fault that XTerm has shonky cut-paste behaviour? gnome-terminal works wonderfully.

Or is this the projector problem again: when you plug a mac into a projector and it doesn't work, people blame the projector. When you plug a linux machine in, people blame linux.

Of course it isn't GNOME's fault if xterm has shonky cut-paste behaviour, but that really only serves to back up my point — don't blame the system if one (or a handful of) apps happen to behave contradictorily to its conventions.

I'd never heard of the projector problem, but given Linux's unreliable track record with multiple monitors, I'm not surprised people blame Linux. The problem as stated doesn't define whether or not the projector is actually at fault or not, so we can only really start diagnosis where intuition leads us.

> and to feel the pain when going back to Linux.

Used Mac for almost three years.

Was enthusiastic when I got one and after close to three years enthusiastic to get back to Linux or even Windows.

I realize Mac users experience it to be much better and I guess with a different workflow it is.

I tried hard to pick it up. I failed miserably.

Going back was a relief for me.

Regarding the terminal, on Gnome-terminal it is possible to rebind copy-paste to ctrl-c and ctrl-v. If you do this you need to start using ctrl+shift+C for ^C

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