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GNOME Clipboard Daemon - your clipboard will actually work

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

Re: GREAT WORK AROUND!!

Submitted by Anonymous George on Thu, 2004-01-29 10:16.

And this (keeping *all* data in the clipboard in memory) is exactly how the old (obsolete) Windows clipboard works. Copying large amounts of data in Windows (using the old model) also has a performance hit.

I don't know what you mean when you say "the old model", but since Windows 95 the clipboard specs haven't changed much for the MS OS.

When using the Windows clipboard, the application can decide if it wants to copy an instance of the data to the clipboard or if it wants to use a callback-like method (this is how the X clipboard works at the moment). While input lines / text editors usually directly copy the data, so it will be usable when the owner closes, bigger apps like picture editors normally use the "callback" method. IIRC, most of the newer Microsoft apps (Word 2000, Excel 2000) even have some sort of internal threshold, so if you just copy a paragraph, it will use the "copy" method, but if you copy like 20 pages, it will use the "callback" method, for example.

Additionally, the Windows clipboard has support for multiple clipboard formats at once (so when copying a webpage into a word processor, apps can request the whole doc + pictures, but simple text editors can request the text which is stripped from HTML code), and some useful built-in automatic conversions (e.g. for image file formats).

I use Gnome as my exclusive desktop everyday, but IMHO the clipboard is actually one thing MS got right in their OS.

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