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Accepted
JohnMerlino
Asked: 2013-11-29 09:38:23 +0800 CST

unable to paste with xclip outside of terminal

  • 772

I am trying to copy from the terminal with xclip and paste it into the unity desktop environment into gedit text editor. I can copy and paste with xclip in terminal:

$ cat line-size.c | xclip
xclip -o > input5.txt
cat input5.txt
#include <stdio.h>
...

However, when I press control + v to paste into gedit, it only pastes the actual last thing I copied within unity desktop, such as something from firefox browser.

How can I paste in gui applications something I copied from terminal?

xclip

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I think it is just a matter of understanding the different selection clipboards used by the xclip utility

       -selection
          specify  which X selection to use, options are "primary" to use
          XA_PRIMARY (default), "secondary" for  XA_SECONDARY  or  "clip‐
          board" for XA_CLIPBOARD

    When you do cat line-size.c | xclip the default behaviour is to copy to the primary X selection buffer - to paste from that buffer, you need to use a mouse middle-click instead of the Ctrl+v combination.

    To copy into the clipboard instead, so that you can paste with Ctrl+v, you would need to do 

    cat line-size.c | xclip -selection clipboard
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  2. Just in case if someone is looking for a shortest version without using aliases. By using something|xclip -se c instead of just bare something|xclip you can press Ctrl+V/Ctrl+Shift+V and see a desirable result. Where something — cat somefile.txt for example.

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