How to disable selection highlight auto-copying

Unix have two main "clipboards", the PRIMARY and the CLIPBOARD.More info in wikipedia the PRIMARY is the "select and paste with the mouse middle click" X11 style and the CLIPBOARD is the traditional copy&paste. Every time you select a text, the PRIMARY gets that text and it its lost when the text stop being selected. This is useful, but require training, as other systems don't require the selection to be active, people are used to click around before pasting and any click will lose the selection.

So what you want is the CLIPBOARD copy&paste that stays until a new CLIPBOARD is loaded. The main problem is that when you are going to do the paste, you may get the PRIMARY or the CLIPBOARD content, depending of the app and the way you use it.

fear not, there are many apps that solve this confusion, by synchronizing both PRIMARY and CLIPBOARD and even having a history, a huge help to manage copy&pastes.

There are many tools, like the Klipper and Glipper for kde and gnome, but many others for other WM and most of then are WM independent. I use parcellite, as its simple and works fine. Check here for many alternatives.

You can also search the net for "clipboard manager" for more info and apps

For yanks, Vim supports setting both unnamed and unnamedplus:

:set clipboard=unnamed,unnamedplus

From :help clipboard-unnamedplus:

      When "unnamed" is also included to the
      option, yank operations (but not delete, change or
      put) will additionally copy the text into register
      '*'.