Pasky’s Log

Call me old-fashioned but I’m still using xterm on my desktop computer (where I use just fluxbox as my window manager) – it suits me just fine, but for one thing that I finally managed to solve. xterm by default ignores the clipboard, and none of the previously published solutions cut it for me, until now.

In X11, we have two commonly used selection buffers – PRIMARY and CLIPBOARD:

• PRIMARY is used when you simply highlight text in most applications, without pressing anything, and you can paste from it using the middle mouse button; it is of fleeting nature and used for quick cut’n’paste; and it doesn’t work well with all applications, e.g. libreoffice doesn’t put highlighted stuff there at least in some contexts and non-textarea HTML5 text edit widgets usually can’t handle the middle button for pasting.
• CLIPBOARD is used when you use ctrl-c or ctrl-v and can be used even with the evil applications above, but the problem is it’s not supported by xterm well!

In most terminal emulators, you can use the clipboard either using menus or shift-ctrl-c / shift-ctrl-v. However, in xterm, the best you can do is either…

• Make it use CLIPBOARD just instead of PRIMARY and in the same manner – the moment you select any text in xterm, it will plaster it over whatever else was in the CLIPBOARD before, without any explicit action. This sucks.
• Have a different set of bindings for selection to PRIMARY and CLIPBOARD. This is a lot better, but I’m out of modifiers since I use shift to cut’n’paste in terminal applications that use mouse themselves (e.g. elinks).

So, my solution is to bring in the shift-ctrl-c / shift-ctrl-v bindings! In your ~/.Xresources or ~/.Xdefaults, add

XTerm*VT100.*translations:      #override \
        Shift Ctrl C: select-end(CLIPBOARD, CUT_BUFFER0) \n\
        Shift Ctrl V: insert-selection(CLIPBOARD, CUT_BUFFER0)

(and don’t forget to xrdb ~/.Xresources afterwards).

Now, you can use shift-ctrl-v for pasting from CLIPBOARD, and almost use shift-ctrl-c for copying to clipboard. There is a catch – you must press shift-ctrl-c while you are still holding the mouse button, i.e you press left mouse button, drag your selection, then before releasing it, press shift-ctrl-c; thankfully, that can be done by one hand without too much cramping.

It’s a bit inconvenient because of this bug, and doesn’t quite work with left and right selection; maybe I will sometime get around to adding true clipboard support to xterm code, but I think this is good enough for me at this point. :)