[gentoo-user] Re: Can't paste from selection in gtk-3 apps

[Grant Edwards]

On 2015-09-16, J. Roeleveld <joost@××××××××.org> wrote:
> On Tuesday, September 15, 2015 06:57:36 PM Grant Edwards wrote:
>> On 2015-09-15, Grant Edwards <grant.b.edwards@×××××.com> wrote:
>> > In most X11 apps I can select some text and then paste it somewhere
>> > else with a middle-click, or dump it to stdout with the command 'xclip
>> > -o'.  That doesn't work for highligted text in gtk-3 apps (meld,
>> > evince, audacious, etc.).  After selecting text in a gtk-3 app, if I
>> > middle-click in a terminal window it does nothing and 'xclip -o' just
>> > hangs.  Selecting text elsewhere will deselect the text in the gtk-3
>> > app, so gtk-3 isn't _completely_ ignoring X11 clipboards/buffers.
>> >
>> > Any ideas why gtk-3 copy/paste is broken and how to fix it?
>>
>> Ah, it turns out it's only a problem if you have multiple screens: you
>> can only paste a gtk-3 selection if the destination is on the same X11
>> screen as the source.  I'm pretty sure this is a known problem, but
>> I'm having trouble finding it again in the Gnome bugtracker...
>
> Must be related to gtk-3 then.
>
> I use 2 screens extensively and never experienced any issues like you
> describe.

And you can select/paste from one screen to another where the source
is a gtk-3 app?

I should clarify that I mean "screen" in the strict X11 usage.  Using
Xinerama or the like to spread a single desktop across multiple
monitors is still a single screen setup.  I'm trying to select text on
DISPLAY=:0.0 and paste it on DISPLAY=:0.1

> Am surprised it would respond differently between GTK-3 and non-GTK-3
> apps.

I'm not.  When somebody selects something, you've got to make onr or
more Xlib function calls to grab control of the selection, and if
you're naive and think that the screen where your program is running
is the only one, then you only make the call to grab control of the
selection for that screen. Apparently the gtk-3 developers never
thought about the possibility that there are mutliple screens in an
X11 session.

> I don't configure anything special for multiple screens in the past
> few years.

Are you really using multiple screens?  Or a single screen spread
across mutliple monitors?  If you start an xterm on every monitor and
do "echo $DISPLAY" in each one, do you get different results or are
they all the same?

-- 
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