Buffers are great. Comes very handy when creating macros in vim.
I think you mean registers not buffers. buffers are file(s) loaded in memory while registers contain text yanked/deleted/last command/last search, etc.
Gee, X11! How come your mom lets you have THREE clipboards?
Yes. X11 replaced X10’s obsolete cut buffers (which can be modified by any process) with state-of-the-art selections. There are three selections in X11: a primary, a secondary, and a clipboard.
In modern desktops, the primary selection is overwritten every time you select some text (including in the terminal), which makes its content very ephemeral. You can paste it with the middle mouse button.
The secondary selection is generally not used, but it’s present in the specification, and you can use xclip -selection secondary to access it. Wayland doesn’t seem to have a secondary selection.
The clipboard selection is what most people understand to be THE clipboard. You have to write to it explicitly (through a keyboard shortcut, API, or CLI tool), and its content persists until it is overwritten, explicitly cleared, or the X server is killed. While the primary and secondary can only contain text, the clipboard can contain many kinds of data.
Okay I had no.idea. So on Plasma, I’m guessing when I copy anything, it’s writing it both the primary selection, and the clipboard selection and that’s how it stays in the clipboard manager thingy?
Y’all haven’t heard of Windows clipboard history? Windows + V will change your life, I tell ya!
Meanwhile, this was a feature on KDE-land since Klipper, which goes back (as far as I know and if I remember well) to KDE 3 or sooner.
There have been third party clipboard managers forever in windows, which is kind of funny because that is almost more like the unix philosophy than expecting the UI system to handle it all.
To be fair it may be a security concern if someone is copy pasting passwords
Give CopyQ a try. Open source, cross platform clipboard manager with tons of features.
One example option is being able to only ever paste plain text. It also has lots of programming hooks, I have a few for doing things like converting a line-feed delimited list into one delimited by commas and quoting the values.
Nevermind simply having an OS-level clipboard manager…
I think windows+v syncs to microsoft servers or something. I remember when I was running chris titus tech’s debloat script it removed that functionality.
An excellent option to have when one of the major use cases for clipboards is as an intermediary for password managers.
I hope they eventually get sued into the fucking ground.
There is for windows, and it’s further improved if you get power toys too
I took a look through my power toys settings, but couldn’t find anything there that had to do with the win+v clipboard history. Google hasn’t been any help either. What is it that I’m overlooking? How does powertoys improve the clipboard history feature?
I’m currently not on my windows pc at the moment but it could be that it’s functionality might actually be native to win 11? I don’t realise use it myself I just remember seeing it when originally getting powertoys and thinking that was cool
Application specific buffers are the first thing I disable on emacs. The OS one isn’t just integrated with every other normal piece of software, it’s also more powerful and easier to use.
… at least on my Linux, YMMV.
Ah, that is what I meant with OS-level clipboard manager (in fact, that is precisely what I thought of).
