[gentoo-user] Re: Weird firefox

[Ian Zimmerman]

On 2018-06-03 00:02, Arve Barsnes wrote:

> What programs are you making the copy from, and in what way? I have
> not had this kind of problem with firefox, but notepadqq's copy/paste
> functionality seems to be messed up for me.

Thanks for your question, which made me take a closer look and led to a
solution.

I was stuffing the clipboard with the xclip(1) program, in a script that
historically looked like this (only slightly simplified):

xclip -o | xclip -i -selection c

The left side of the pipe takes the selection, which is a transient
thing, and echoes it on stdout; the right side reads that on stdin and
stuffs it into the long-lived clipboard.  At some point I became worried
that this may be hazardous, because by default the clipboard is
available forever (limited to a single session of X of course).  I
thought if I forget what I put into the clipboard pasting it could have
unexpected results.  So I changed the above to:

xclip -o | xclip -i -loops 1 -selection c

This makes the clipboard available for exactly 1 access.  But it turns
out firefox, for whatever reason, grabs the clipboard _twice_ before it
actually pastes it into the urlbar, and so the second time was
failing and aborting the whole paste operation.  Now I changed it to
-loops 2 and it works again.

Dragons indeed!

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