Autocutsel utility

This was in Puppy 3.01 and earlier, but not in 4.00 and 4.1. Autocutsel is a little daemon, /usr/bin/autocutsel, that runs in the background when X is running and synchronises the selection-buffer and the clipboard. This is useful for some older apps, such as the rxvt terminal. For example, if you highlight text in rxvt, it immediately goes into the selection-buffer, and may be pasted into another application by means of a middle-button mouse click -- well, this mechanism is generic, works (more or less) for all X applications. Autocutsel does one extra thing though, it copies the contents of the selection-buffer into the clipboard, which means that text highlighted in rxvt can be pasted into another application by CTRL-V or the menu File -> Paste. It does not work in reverse though -- you cannot copy text to the clipboard in another app then paste that into rxvt -- you have to use the traditional highlight-text then middle-button-press to paste into rxvt.

There was a report that Autocutsel does not work in 4.1, but I have just tested this and it works as expected (with the exception of a problem with Geany, described below).

Note that you do have to get the 'autocutsel' PET package out of the Puppy4 repo, not the Puppy3 repo, as the latter has a dependency on libXaw95.

Note also, there is a problem with Geany and the selection-buffer (nothing to do with autocutsel). Often if I highlight text in Geany, it does not go into the selection-buffer and cannot be pasted into rxvt. This is strange, inconsistent behaviour, and I am wondering if it has something to do with the version of Geany as I don't recall this problem before. Installing Autocutsel does not fix it. On the otherhand, I canconsistently highlight text in Abiword and paste it into rxvt.

I already rolled Geany back for Puppy 4.1, to version 0.12, as I wasn't happy with some features of 0.13. Perhaps I should test even older versions.

A note also on Autocutsel. I don't recommend it. It offer a minimal advantage (in my opinion) and has the disadvantage of adding noticeably to the background overhead of the CPU.

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Comments

My Thoughts


Neat Geany Workaround
Username: GeoW
"Try this: Open your file in Geany and highlight some text Open a terminal and confirm that you cannot copy Now, with the text still highlighted, in Geany [b]Search>Find>Close [/b] Now you can drop the text into the terminal! GeoW

Re: Geany workaround
Username: BarryK
"GeoW, :happy: hey, yes, that works!

Tags: puppy