cut/paste issues in VNC

[Wayne Throop]

: Cutting from the Xvnc session to a MS application works without a problem.
: But sometimes, attempts to cut from an MS app to a Xvnc session result in
: pasting only the previously-cut Xvnc text.
: Any ideas?

Soit'ny.  It sounds like the "cutbuffer vs primary selection" problem.
X windows is such a huge collection of kludges on top of kludges that
there are several ways that various applications treat cut and paste.
Some use an X facility called the "cutbuffer".   Some use a capability
called "selection".  Some use both.

Xvnc / vncviewer uses the cutbuffer.  Netscape and some other appliations
use the primary selection instead.  The xterm program uses both.

Thus, if you cut something on an MS appliation, then go into the
viewer, you can probably paste it into an xterm, but only if
nobody else has the primary selection in the window.  And it would
never paste into X-based netscape properly.

So how to solve it.  There's an X program called "xcutsel"
that comes in standard X releases.  It's just a little widget that
presents you with three buttons: quit, copy selection to cutbuffer,
and copy cutbuffer to selection.  So, if you run xcutsel in
your Xvnc desktop, and then cut something out of an MS application,
you should click on use xcutsel to copy it from the buffer to
the selection; then you can paste it anywhere inside X.

It's clumsy, and I've wished Xvnc / vncviewer would act more like xterm,
and try to use both in a more DWIM manner...  but I can sympathize; it's
a complicated issue.  Complicated because X has suffered so severely
from code and feature bloat.  As the old saying goes, "nine out of every
ten pointers point at something in X."  So far, I've just learned to live 
with the xcutsel solution. 

You can search the online documentation and mailing list
archives for "xcutsel" for further information.

Wayne Throop   throopw "at" sheol.org
               http://sheol.org/throopw
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