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I don't understand the middle click paste.

Sometimes I highlight text, middle click in the window where I want it to go and it does what I want. Sometimes it doesn't.

For instance, when I highlight text in Firefox, then go and middle click into terminal vim, nothing happens.

What is going on?

Thank you!

Jorge Castro
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Fawkes5
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3 Answers3

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Caused by separate X/DE clipboards; keep them synchronized with ClipIt

  • As ImaginaryRobots' answer explains there are two different clipboards: the X clipboard and the desktop environment/window manager clipboard (Gnome/Unity, KDE, etc.); depending on the selection method used (i.e. just highlighting, or an explicit Ctrl-C/right-click copy, etc.), the two clipboards may not be synchronized.

    • Thus, there are often issues when copying/pasting between GUI programs and the terminal.

  • The easiest solution if you have this problem is to use a tool that keeps both these separate clipboards in sync. I recommend ClipIt (sudo apt-get install clipit)

    • Start clipit (add to Startup Applications for convenience), and under Preferences, check both the Use Primary and Synchronize Clipboards options:

    enter image description here

Community
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ish
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    Wonderful, this is exactly what i needed – Fawkes5 Jul 24 '12 at 22:26
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    I prefer to disable clipboard synchronization because sometimes I want to copy something with Ctrl-C, select the text I want to replace and hit Ctrl-V. With clipboard synchronization what I would get is the same text I selected, not the one that I copied. – jcollado Aug 01 '12 at 13:23
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    Give Parcellite a try --a lighter alternative of ClipIt – pl1nk Aug 09 '12 at 15:34
  • @ish that's pretty cool. I want to further extend this functionality. Can you please have a look at https://askubuntu.com/questions/1248629/show-clipboard-history-menu-on-middle-click-paste and maybe give me some suggestions? – supersan Jun 10 '20 at 18:09
  • @pl1nk would appreciate your suggestions as well.. thanks – supersan Jun 10 '20 at 18:09
  • For pop os I use https://github.com/diodon-dev/diodon – alextrastero Nov 25 '21 at 07:31
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There are actually 2 different kinds of copy & paste - there's the one provided by the underlying X11 graphics system, and there's the one provided by your window manager (Gnome, KDE, etc).

Highlighting text without clicking is enough to get it copied to the X11 buffer-space, and middle-clicking will paste out of that. If you use control-X or control-C, it will use the window-manager's buffer space as well (since you had to have highlighted it to use those keys), but only a control-V will get the text out of there - middle clicking won't.

To make things more confusing, window manager copy & paste will work with non-text items too, so even if your highlighting had gotten some text into both buffers, you might then have some files or complex data in the window-manager buffer instead and the two will be out of sync.

Some applications are smart enough to understand and use both, others aren't. Terminal windows are usually of the stupid variety when it comes to copy & paste. There are usually settings for each application to tell them how to fix the copy & paste mess, but getting them all set up correctly is a lot of work. Ubuntu gets most of them by default, I think.

The situation was historically much worse, and led to freedesktop defining standards around it:

http://standards.freedesktop.org/clipboards-spec/clipboards-latest.txt

ImaginaryRobots
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Okay so when you select the text, you must click on an empty area to deselect the text and then middle click wherever you want to paste it, if you don't deselect the highlighted area then it will NOT work.

shreyash mali
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