[SOLVED] A text copy and paste problem

[mla]

On one of my Mageia 4 machines I have a very irritating problem with copy-and-paste. As a long-standing Unix/Linux user, I am used to just highlighting text to be copied and then middle-clicking to paste it. On one machine (and one machine only) highlighting is insufficient -- one has to explicitly copy, after which middle click does indeed paste the text. Without an explicit copy what gets pasted instead is whatever was explicitly copied before.

Now, I do have a vague memory of doing (after the install) something to some option to do with the buffer into which copied stuff goes. But I don't recall what or where, and hunting through various configuration settings available, I can't work out what it was I'd done.

Any help, anybody?

P.S. Is there any reason why Control Center has stuff specific to the account (such as importing one's bookmark's from Windows), while System Settings has a section which affects all users of the machine and hence requires root password? Doesn't seem logical to this simple mind.

[doktor5000]

Hi, what desktop environment do you use that exhibits the copy&paste problem?

For MCC vs systemsettings, yes it is illogical :/ MCC should be for system-wide stuff and systemsettings only for desktop and per-user configuration.
Sadly many desktop environments think they need to merge as much tools as possible in there ...

[mla]

Hi, what desktop environment do you use that exhibits the copy&paste problem?

Sorry, should have said. Vanilla KDE.

Sadly many desktop environments think they need to merge as much tools as possible in there ...

Ah... Is Artificial Intelligence actually here then?

[doktor5000]

You want to check if klipper is running, and how it's configured: http://userbase.kde.org/Klipper
May currently be hidden in systray, there's a triangle -> show hidden programs (don't know the exact translation)

Bildschirmfoto2_69.png (20.19 KiB) Viewed 1215 times

In general you have your primary clipboard, which is provided by X server. Handled by marking with the mouse, and insert on middle-click.
your usual clipboard is for copy & paste via Ctrl+C / Ctrl-V.

For more details see
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/clipboard
http://superuser.com/questions/90257/wh ... clipboards

[mla]

Aha! It's the Klipper config I needed to tweak. I really should have thought of that, but I keep forgetting about Klipper as a separate utility. It all used to be buried within the X server.

Thanks for your help!

[mla]

Actually. it wasn't Klipper after all. Tweaking that cured the original problem but caused another one -- highlight and middle click stopped working between two Konsole windows. That (finally!) pointed me in the right direction. It was a Konsole profile-specific setting which was tripping me up. I had "Paste from clipboard" checked, instead of "Paste from selection".

Now that I have cured that *and* set Klipper to "Synchronise contents of the clipboard and the selection", I am finally quite happy with the way it works.