Keyboard shortcut to paste selected text to SECONDARY clipboard

clipboardx11

I am aware that mouse selection and CTRL+C adds content to the PRIMARY and CLIPBOARD X Selections but I need a keyboard shortcut(or mouse) to have the selected text in SECONDARY Selection.

Any leads would be very helpful.

Best Answer

It's impossible to define such a shortcut unless the application supports it. The notion of selected text is entirely within the application, there's no way to access it from the outside, and there's no way to ask the application for the selected text (except by using some application-specific protocol).

Many applications automatically copy the selected text to the primary selection — that's how the primary selection is supposed to be used (but, once again, this is a convention, not a system feature). Hence the suggestion to have a shortcut that copies the primary selection to the secondary selection, e.g. with xsel -o | xsel -s.

Related Solutions

Copy (to X clipboard) shortcut in .tmux.conf

This reply doesn't answer directly your question about creating a shortcut. But here's what I do.

You can temporarily suspend passing your keys/mouse events to tmux by holding shift. So you can press and hold Shift and user regular shortcuts of terminal/X to do the copy. In my case using Terminator, I press shift, highlight with mouse whatever I want, copy with Ctrl+Shift+C

And in case you have split panes, you can zoom the current pane with zoom-toggle-key Prefix + z, and perform the copy operation. (tested on tmux v1.8)

Copy / paste text selections between tmux and the clipboard

Use the following tmux.conf with copy-pipe in the new versions of tmux (1.8+):

set -g mouse on
# To copy:
bind-key -n -t emacs-copy M-w copy-pipe "xclip -i -sel p -f | xclip -i -sel c "

# To paste:
bind-key -n C-y run "xclip -o | tmux load-buffer - ; tmux paste-buffer"

prefix+[ into copy-mode
select content with mouse(hold)
M-w to copy that part into system clipboard
C-y the paste it inside tmux, C-v to paste it inside other regular application like web browser.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Copy (to X clipboard) shortcut in .tmux.conf

Copy / paste text selections between tmux and the clipboard

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