Edgy: cannot paste text in Gnome apps from Emacs

[David Marín]

I'm running an up-to-date edgy.

If in Emacs 21, I select text (or manually copy through the Edit/Copy option in menu) from an opened buffer, I cannot paste it in any Gnome application, nor Firefox.

However, the paste action works perfectly in xterm.

[David Marín (davefx)]

After upgrading Ubuntu, this strange behaviour has finished. Now I can correctly paste from Emacs to other Gnome apps. One of the updated packages has fixed this problem.

[speeves (speeves)]

Can you try this hint from the EmacsWiki?

<snip>
X11 Copy & Paste to/from Emacs:

Emacs 21.2.1 & newer:

 (setq x-select-enable-clipboard t)

See also http://www.oreillynet.com/lpt/wlg/6162 which suggests

 (setq x-select-enable-clipboard t) ; as above
 (setq interprogram-paste-function 'x-cut-buffer-or-selection-value)

For the record, none of these have allowed me to copy and paste between Emacs and Firefox/386 1.5.0.1 on Ubuntu/amd64. – EraEriksson
</snip>

Let us know if that fixes it. Also, if you could add that to the response as well.

thanks,
speeves

[speeves (speeves)]

Let us know if that fixes it. Also, if you could add that to the response as well.
</snip>

I meant, "if you could add i386/amd64 to your response as well". :P

thanks,
speeves

[speeves (speeves)]

This is fixed by adding:

; fix the clipboard with X11
(setq x-select-enable-clipboard t)

to your .emacs.

It fixes it in Debian Sid (amd64)... I have updated the report on http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=378234

to reflect this information.

[speeves (speeves)]

This problem reappears with emacs21 in Feisty, with:
(setq x-select-enable-clipboard t)

I then installed emacs-snapshot, and the copying between emacs and other GNOME apps began working again.

[Antti P Miettinen (apm)]

I can confirm that feisty emacs21 has trouble pasting text copied from e.g. firefox and that emacs-snapshot seems to behave better.

[Luca Falavigna (dktrkranz)]

Do you still notice this issue in newer releases?

[speeves (speeves)]

It's a little hard to tell on my end, as I am running a backport of emacs22 on Debian Etch, (though I still have emacs21 installed).

ii emacs21 21.4a+1-3etch1 The GNU Emacs editor
ii emacs21-bin-common 21.4a+1-3etch1 The GNU Emacs editor's shared, architecture
ii emacs21-common 21.4a+1-3etch1 The GNU Emacs editor's shared, architecture
ii emacs22-bin-common 22.1+1-1~edh.0 The GNU Emacs editor's shared, architecture
ii emacs22-common 22.1+1-1~edh.0 The GNU Emacs editor's shared, architecture
ii emacs22-common-non-dfsg 22.1+1-1~edh.0 GNU Emacs shared, architecture independent,
ii emacs22-el 22.1+1-1~edh.0 GNU Emacs LISP (.el) files
ii emacs22-gtk 22.1+1-1~edh.0 The GNU Emacs editor (with GTK user interfac
me@mylaptop:~$ cat /etc/debian_version
4.0

For what it's worth, my comment on 2007-03-27 appears to be accurate, (setq x-select-enable-clipboard t), fixes the clipboard issue on emacs22, but not on emacs21.

[Luca Falavigna (dktrkranz)]

Looking at Debian bug report, maintainer closed bug report stating that the correct way to enable this feature is provided at http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/CopyAndPaste.