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kenn
Asked: 2014-03-14 06:26:22 +0800 CST

Clipboard syncronization between wine and X11

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I installed Lingoes dictionary in Wine. It has a popup translator that is triggered by clipboard change. When I copy or select an item it must translate the word, but in Wine, when I copy or select a word, Lingoes dictionary remains unresponsive as if nothing has been copied. I can paste into Lingoes dictionary through right click context menu then it translates.

How can I enable auto clipboard sync between Wine and X11?

wine

2 Answers

  1. The solution is listed in this thread, namely you need to create registry entry

    [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\X11 Driver]
"UsePrimarySelection"="1"

    (some sources suggest "UsePrimarySelection"="y" but that has the same effect).

    For more information refer this post. In particular if you want to copy text from VNC server (e.g. Linux) to VNC client (e.g. Windows), you need to install additionally autocutsel and add to ~/.vnc/xstartup something like this:

    autocutsel -s PRIMARY -fork

    This is needed because historically VNC protocol uses old and deprecated CUTBUFFER (legendary applications like xterm support it from those ancient times out of the box), while new applications like Wine use CLIPBOARD by default (switched to PRIMARY with registry option above). autocutsel should be used to synchronize all these types of buffers.

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  2. Thanks to dma_ks answer I found a variant that worked for me.

    1. Open a terminal window Ctrl+Alt+t
    2. export WINEPREFIX=~/.wine32/ use your defined WINEPREFIX
    3. (optional) export WINEDEBUG=fixme-all
    4. (optional) Query if you have it already set
    :~$ wine reg query "HKLM\Software\Wine\X11 Driver"
reg: The system was unable to find the specified registry key or value
:~$ wine reg query "HKCU\Software\Wine\X11 Driver"
reg: The system was unable to find the specified registry key or value
    1. ADD the registry key to Current User (HKCU) and Local Machine (HKLM), what I have read in the source code doesn't seem to check HKLM but I could have missed it somewhere, probably doesn't hurt to have them both set.
    :~$ wine reg add "HKCU\Software\Wine\X11 Driver" /v UsePrimarySelection /t REG_SZ /d 1
The operation completed successfully
:~$ wine reg add "HKLM\Software\Wine\X11 Driver" /v UsePrimarySelection /t REG_SZ /d 1
The operation completed successfully

    In the example I have set it to 1 which defines TRUE. Other valid options, as defined in the source files, are

    • TRUE : y Y t T 1
    • FALSE : n N f F 0
    1. You can now close the terminal window and start your wine app

    Note1: WINEPREFIX must be set to and coincide with the wineprefix on which your application runs, if each app runs on a different prefix you will probably need to modify each one

    Note2: HKLM and HKCU are registry key shortcuts for HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE and HKEY_CURRENT_USER respectively

    Note3: You can perform all of this aswell by using the GUI app regedit. You can launch it with wine regedit.

    Details:

    Having a look through the source code it appears as wine

    1. First checks the application specific value HKCU\Software\Wine\AppDefaults\app.exe\X11 Driver\UsePrimarySelection and returns its assigned value if it exists
    2. if it did not find an application specific value it checks the current user "general" value HKCU\Software\Wine\X11 Driver\UsePrimarySelection and returns its assigned value if it exists

    Related:

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