support for CLIPBOARD selection

[izirajder]

Binary package hint: putty

In putty, you only have to select the text to copy it to the clipboard. However, pasting (with the middle button) only works in the same putty window or between putty windows, but I cannot paste for example into a web browser or text editor (using Ctrl-V). When trying to paste, it pastes the content of the clipboard which putty didn't in fact modify at all. So it seems that putty uses its own clipboard for copying.
Pasting into putty from the "main" clipboard works, however. So, for example, I can paste a text into putty that I have selected and copied using Ctrl-C from a web browser.
I have gone through all of the settings of putty and couldn't find a relevant setting option.
This bug is quite annoying because I cannot copy an error message from putty and paste it into Google to search for a solution.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

This is probably just the usual difference between the PRIMARY and CLIPBOARD selections in X, which occasionally causes confusion; basically, after selecting text in PuTTY, you always need to paste it into other applications using middle-click, never with Edit->Paste. See http://www.jwz.org/doc/x-cut-and-paste.html for more discussion on this.

It would be nice if PuTTY had some way to copy text to the CLIPBOARD selection, all the same. This is sort of what's noted in the upstream paste-semantics wishlist entry (http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/wishlist/paste-semantics.html); note that the mouse-handling option mentioned at the end of that entry is only available on Windows.

[John Miezitis (jomn)]

xterm addressed this issue with an option to copy between the PRIMARY selectino and CLIPBOARD.
The option can be set via command line xterm -ls -xrm ‘XTerm*selectToClipboard: true’
or via Xdefaults: XTerm*selectToClipboard: true

see https://www.starnet.com/xwin32kb/copying-and-pasting-in-xterm/

Would be great to have this feature in putty.

I run a VNC server on a Linux server and connect to it from Windows. Copy and pasting from putty running on the server in VNC to a windows application is a four or five step process where as it should be just select and paste.

Thank you.

[Jacob Nevins (0jacobnk-ulp)]

PuTTY upstream release 0.71 (not yet packaged for Ubuntu) adds options for using the CLIPBOARD selection (off by default).
https://the.earth.li/~sgtatham/putty/0.71/htmldoc/Chapter4.html#config-clipboards