[TAG] puzzled by cut-n-paste

[Mike Orr]

On 11/8/05, Kapil Hari Paranjape <kapil at imsc.res.in> wrote:
> I think the problem has nothing really to do with "vi" per se.
>
> It is more likely the point that the display buffer of your terminal
> is being cleared before you "paste".

If you have kde, there's a neat little applet 'klipper' that acts like
a clipboard ring; it saves the last seven items copied.  That'll show
whether your item was really copied, and also whether another item
(usually an empty selection) was copied later.  This happens to me
often when pasting URLs from Firefox's address box into another
program.  It's still highlighted in Firefox bit it won't paste, and
klipper shows an empty selection after it.

Another problem is, I think I read that X has two clipboards, one for
simple mouse selections, the other requiring more specific action like
"copy" or "paste" in a program.  I may not have the details right. 
But vim also has its own paste buffer ('y' and 'p' commands), which
sometimes affects/is affected by the system clipboard(s) and sometimes
not -- I still haven't figured out the rules.

> Point to ponder:
>         "When the screen is wiped clear where does the data on it go?"

Is it still data if there's nobody around to view it?

This message was made with 100% recycled electrons.

--
Mike Orr <sluggoster at gmail.com> or <mso at oz.net>