xwinclip: unable to paste INTO a highlighted area (linux -> linux and windows -> linux)

[Harold L Hunt II]

Jay,

That is just the way that X is designed.  Stupid?   Yes.  When you 
select text, you copy it into the buffer, displacing whatever you had 
just copied before.

Harold

Jay Smith wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I know that "copy highlighting" has been discussed to death, but I have 
> not found any recent references to the problem of, WITHIN LINUX or from 
> WINDOWS TO LINUX, not being able to do a copy and *then* highlight an 
> area and *paste* into the highlighted to *replace* the highlighted text.
> 
> If I copy/paste from Linux -> Windows95, it works properly, I can 
> highlight source text and then highlight the target and paste into the 
> target thus replacing the highlighted text in the target with the source 
> text.
> 
> However, if I am copy/pasting between two LINUX applications, i.e. 
> Mozilla Mail, anytime I highlight anything, that goes into the "buffer". 
> If I highlight target text that I want to replace with source text I 
> have copied, the source text that I originally copied is gone and 
> instead the text in the target is in the buffer.
> 
> If I am copy/pasting from Windows95 -> Linux I also have the problem.
> 
> The bottom line is that for linux -> linux copy/paste, xwinclip *breaks* 
> the copy/paste behavior in Linux. Without xwinclip, I can highlight 
> target text and replace it with source text that I have copied by 
> highlighting and doing a ctrl-c.
> 
> I find it odd that this problem has not *seemed* to get more attention. 
> 95% of the copy/paste that I do involves a) copying source text, b) then 
> highlighting another block of text (i.e the target), and c) pasting the 
> copied source text into the highlighted target.
> 
> Because of this problem, I have to reverse the order of things (not 
> natural) and delete the text in the target area before pasting into the 
> target area.  If I am doing repeated pastes of the same content, perhaps 
> into multiple documents, this is a huge pain.
> 
> I understand that xwinclip seems to use the concept that any text 
> highlighted is automatically copied.  I suppose that the reason for this 
> has to do with various applications using different ctrl and alt 
> keystrokes for their own purposes.  For example, a ctrl-c in a kshell 
> cancels the command line.
> 
> However, there really should be a way to deal with this problem.  Is 
> there and I have just missed it?
> 
> Maybe if some ctrl-alt-shift, etc., key was held down while 
> highlighting, that action would block xwinclip from putting the 
> highlighted text into the buffer.
> 
> My environment is:
> 
> Windows 95 running Cygwin ....
>    XFree86-base     4.2.0-1
>           -lib      4.2.0-5
>           -xserv    4.2.0-28 (that's what it says: 28)
>           -xwinclip 4.2.0-8
> 
> I am using XDM to get to RedHat Linux 8 which has been kept up to date,
> using up2date, to just BEFORE the point a couple weeks ago that they
> screwed things up with the glib disaster.  (I feel like I have been
> Microsoft'ed; my faith in RH has been devastated.)
> 
> Any ideas/suggestions or fixes?  If more environment info is needed, please
> advise.
> 
> Jay
>