As my old Ubuntu LTS 12.04 runs out of maintenance this year, I've setup a fresh system using Linux Mint 18.1 Cinnamon.
I am used to two independent clipboard buffers: Ctrl-C stores to the clipboard (which can be used with Ctrl-V then), while selecting text with the mouse goes to "primary" (which can be pasted via the middle mouse button then). That way I can copy two strings, and afterwards paste them separately.
This worked great ever since I started using Linux ~20 years ago. But now with Cinnamon, primary always gets copied to the clipboard automatically, leaving me with the same string in both buffers.
How to prevent that from happening?
Of course I have consulted other questions here, using the clipboard tag as well as search. Found several questions dealing with the very same issue, but none offered a solution to me:
- How can I disable selection highlight auto-copying? says to configure it in Clipman – but there is no such application installed, nor available in the repos
- How to toggle or turn off text selection being sent to the clipboard only has a solution for KDE
and so on. I also used the DConf Editor to check for corresponding settings, no luck here either. Might have to do with how Cinnamon handles this (my primary guess), or the switch from X11 to Wayland is behind it (possible, but not that likely:¹ I've tried multiple clipboard managers like ClipIt, Glipper, and they could be configured to just consider one of the two for keeping snippets (while the system still copied things over)).
Any solutions?
UPDATE: I just noticed that both "buffers" stay separate while in graphical apps (i.e. Firefox text boxes, graphical editors etc) – but are merged as soon as I enter a text-based app (xterm, gnome-terminal). Maybe this gives a clue?
¹ Wayland ruled out. Though Mint 18.1 comes with some Wayland libs installed, it's running X11.
dpkg -l
, there are 4 wayland libs installed, includinglibwayland-server0
– but also a lot of x11 libs. Andps aux
doesn't show a single process matching either "wayland" or "x11", case insensitive. // Thanks for the link! Interesting read, but unfortunaly only talks about "we should" – but not how it might be enabled.loginctl
to find your session number, eg 1, then runloginctl show-session 1 -p Type
. It would sayType=x11
for good old X11.~/.xsessionrc
? Or is it rather the display manager (mdm in my case) responsible for that? Did a recursivegrep -i clip
on/etc/X11
, but couldn't find anything that seemed related.