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title: X11 keybindings for easier terminal clipboard handling
date: 2015-02-12 15:35:15+01:00
format: md
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After years of annoyance with the X11 behaviour for clipboard and selection
handling with regards to terminal applications, I managed to find a good
compromise via some additional shortcurts in my window manager of choice, dwm
and terminal multiplexer, tmux.

Now, pressing `C-o p` (in tmux) pastes from X11 primary selection, `C-o P` from
the clipboard and `Linux-z` (meaning the key formerly known is Windows key)
exchanges clipboard and primary selection, so no more awkward pasting and
selecting with the mouse in order to get the correct string in the correct
location.

    # to switch clipboard and primary selection
    PRIMARY=`xsel -op`; xsel -ob | xsel -ip; echo "$PRIMARY" | xsel -ib

    # to paste from primary selection in tmux
    bind p run "tmux set-buffer \"$(xsel -op)\"; tmux paste-buffer

Other useful keybindings in tmux would copying into the clipboard etc. and
there is a useful [SO
post](https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/77355/tmux-xclip-copy-no-longer-working/77587#77587)
explaning that.

As before this is public at the
[customisations](https://github.com/Ferada/dwm/tree/customisations) branch on
Github; I still have to upload the tmux part though.