Some years ago (when I was still young and naive) I implemented a tool that had the purpose of fixing the many issues of the X11 clipboard. While some people packaged and even used it, I didn’t succeed in really fixing any of the issues.
The real fix is harder and more difficult. It involves working together, X11 politics, creating standards and agreeing upon a set of solution and or proposals.
Therefore I created a document that enlightens my views on the subject. It contains some proposals that might or might not be doable. The purpose isn’t to get these specific proposals into the throats of the developers of our free desktop environments. The purpose of the document is to keep people talking about these problems. Who knows someday people will start fixing them.
An overview of the subjects:
- Sharing the clipboard with console applications like vim;
- Clipboard owner dies means that the clipboard is gone;
- Performance issues when xserver is remote while clipboard owner and requester run on the same host;
- Standardisation of clipboard-formats;
- Standardisation of a transformable clipboard-format;
- Recovery of the clipboard upon session-start;
- Addressing backwards compatibility;
- Extending the clipboard: Virtualization and network clipboard sharing;
- Confusing multiple clipboards.
ps. If you find errors in the document, feel free to inform me about them.