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GNOME Clipboard Daemon - your clipboard will actually work

Submitted by FooBarWidget on Sat, 2004-01-24 08:49. FreeDesktop.org
FreeDesktop.org

Normally, when you copy something in an X application and you close it, the content of the clipboard is lost. This is probably one of the biggest reasons why people keep saying that copy & paste in Linux "doesn't work".

GNOME Clipboard Daemon is a program that keeps the content of your X clipboard in memory, so the clipboard won' get lost even after you close the application you copied from. It's a daemon - it has no GUI. You start it and it'll run in the background and Just Work(tm).Click here for more information, source & binaries.

Can this work at all?

Submitted by Anonymous George on Sun, 2004-01-25 18:45.

How can this daemon possibly do the right thing? In X11, the data is not copied to the clipboard, the application only informs the clipboard about the data. It provides a list of formats it can provide the data in. Another application can then ask for the data in the format it supports best. Now what format does this daemon store? All formats? Whenever something is put on the clip-board the daemon requests it in all formats listed? That would be a major performance hit because the application that offers the data might have to do expensive conversions for some of the formats it offers.

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