Progress towards universal Copy/Paste shortcuts on Linux | Hacker News Reader

Progress towards universal Copy/Paste shortcuts on Linux

mark.stosberg.com

18 pointsolalonde11 comments

99 percent of the time the x11 select middle click paste behaviour is more ergonomic, to the point where when I don't have it I get cranky.

Another case of where because the better system is suppressed on the more common environment, We are unable to advance the desktop metaphor.

If I am fair I think lack of middle click paste is the main reason I don't enjoy using windows much.

The mmb-paste thing is called the 'yank buffer' (and it was a vi/Emacs feature that pre-dates clipboard-based copy/paste) - I use it extensively too, and one important thing to know about it is that it only works on text and it 'yanks' the text when you mmb, so the source app must still be running at the time.

I think it's great that there are 2 ways to move things around, but it does help a lot to be very clear on how both of them work, and some apps do things a bit differently too (eg Ctrl+C in Houdini can be followed by mmb in a terminal, which is a bit unusual, but ok once understood)

No, it is not.

Emacs may use the term "yank buffer" globally. vim does not: in vim, they are simply called "buffers". There is a command called "yank" because it is bound by default to "y" but this command is not the only way to place text into a buffer.

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/learning-the-vi/9780596...

In X11, the text goes into the "[Primary] Selection" or the Cut Buffer[s].

https://www.xfree86.org/current/xcutsel.1.html

CUT_BUFFER0 is the default, and obviously there can be more with higher numbers. But when you're pressing the middle mouse button, you're typically pasting the PRIMARY selection. There has never, ever been usage of "yank" in X11 documentation.

The lack of a universally functioning clipboard is the #1 blocker to Linux acceptance on the desktop.

The Mac had this figured out in 1984. Linux still struggles in 2025.

Wow as a non Linux user I would never have even imagined this would be an issue - why would you use an OS that doesn’t just let you ctrl c/x/v?

In practice, it's not really an issue. In some applications (most notably terminal emulators, where ctrl+c is already used to terminate a process) you have to use an alternative combination (e.g. ctrl+shift+c).

MacOS neatly avoids this issue with the command key, but I'm not sure what happens in Windows.

The common shortcuts do work in 99% of situations. The primary exception is terminals.

The problem is mainly that Linux has two clipboards running simultaneously, with slightly different behaviors.

In reality, the clipboard works fine. There are some gotchas, but for everyday use it's perfectly fine. The opinion expressed by parent comment is, uh, unconventional. I've never heard this take before. Most people consider Linux clipboards an annoyance that we should fix someday, it's not a showstopper by any means (for average users)

I just tend to completely forget the select-clipboard even exists - right until a HN submission reminds me, or I drop some garbage in the middle of the text I'm writing.

Text-wise the only thing I can think of where clipboards don't Just Work is indeed terminals, but I hardly consider that an issue in practice. Either it's a trivial session and I'll happily right-click to paste, or I'm in tmux and using lead key prefixes for shortcuts already.

Cross-app rich media copy/paste does have a habit of being a bit buggy from time to time, though...

I like them being separate. The main one feels more intentional than the selection buffer, which I mostly use for grabbing text I want right now. I'd be annoyed if my main clipboard got overwritten every time I selected text.

You got it backwards. Mmb used to work flawlessly in Linux as in other X11 based unices "back in the day" before some DEs decided they would do it differently to be more palatable to people used to $OTHER_OS I don't remember the details as I'm never been a desktop person, but I do remember that I got surprised one day to discover that something that simple ceased to be reliable.

Hey, they don't have excel or word, like I have at work, and none of the other professional software like Photoshop or premiere, I can't play AAA games, and none of my friends use it either. But that's cool. The clipboard though... that I cannot abide.

Put another way, I strongly disagree that the clipboard is the main obstacle. (And fwiw, Linux has been my main OS for decades)

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