How to use just one unified clipboard? (even for IntelliJ’s “copy path”)

clipboardintellijx11

I don't really understand the linux clipboard/s scheme. Instead of understanding it, is there a way to simplify it into one, unified clipboard? You know, so I could copy in any app and paste in any other?

The current issue that's bugging me is IntelliJ's "copy path" action seems to copy the path of the current file, but I can only paste it back into IntelliJ itself – if I try to paste it into a terminal, the content simply isn't in the clipboard.

Best Answer

There are several clipboard managers such as parcellite, klipper, glipper, glippy, anamnesis, pastie and others. These generally allow you to manage your clipboard by presenting a history.

Some of them allow you to treat the primary and secondary clipboards as one (parcellite and klipper definitely do).

Anamnesis allows you to plow through your history with a search tool.

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Clipboard utility to paste back multiple lines one by one

With xclip:

while IFS= read -r line; do
  printf %s "$line" |
    xclip -l 1 -quiet -selection clipboard -in
done < file.txt

Replace %s with %s\n if you need the newline included.

With -l 1 xclip holds the CLIPBOARD selection for one request (by other applications doing Ctrl-V for instance), and then exits. You need -quiet for xclip to do that in foreground.

That won't work if you have an application like xclipboard running. Those applications try to always be the owner of the CLIPBOARD selection, so will steal it continuously from xclip.

If you have such an application running, you can either suspend or kill it, or you could use the PRIMARY selection instead (-selection primary, or omit -selection as primary is the default) and paste using the middle mouse button. Many terminal emulators can paste the PRIMARY selection upon Shift-Insert, some other upon Ctrl-Shift-Insert.

If you want to know who is stealing the CLIPBOARD selection from xclip, this may work:

xwininfo -id "$(xclip -selection clipboard -o -t CLIENT_WINDOW | od -vAn -tu8)" -wm

provided that application offers the CLIENT_WINDOW target (run xclip -selection clipboard -o -t TARGETS to see if it does).

See also expect (and dejagnu for a testing framework based on expect) and GNU screen to automate inserting text into terminal applications.

Vi – Copy Current Line to Clipboard Under Cursor Without Mouse Selection

If your Vim is compiled with the +clipboard feature (check if +clipboard appears in :version or in vim --version), then there are two special registers that designate the system clipboard. The register "+ designates the clipboard, which is used by Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V. The register "* designates the primary selection, which is used by mouse selection and middle-click to paste.

To make a deletion, yank or put command act on an alternate register, prefix it with a double quote and the register character. For example, to copy the current line to the clipboard, type "+yy

If your Vim doesn't have the +clipboard feature, you can use an external utility to access the clipboard. You'll need Vim to have access to the X display, of course (the DISPLAY environment variable must be set). Use the :w command with an argument starting with ! to pipe the specified lines through a program. With xsel:

:.w !xsel -b

Best Answer

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Clipboard utility to paste back multiple lines one by one

Vi – Copy Current Line to Clipboard Under Cursor Without Mouse Selection

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