Copy/Paste in Linux

This tip is so basic. But so many people coming from a Windows world do not know it.
Once they find out it comes as a complete revelation :-)

In linux highlighting text will put it into the clipboard, and pressing your mouse centre button or mouse wheel will paste it.

If you have no centre button or mouse wheel, press left and right buttons at the same time.

Middle button copy/paste works in almost all applications including terminal windows. Some applications such as KDE and OpenOffice also support Windows style CtlC/CtlV Copy/Paste. So for example you could use either CtlC/CtlV or mouse wheel click to transfer data between Kwrite and Open Office. There is a setting in OpenOffice to define the behaviour of mouse wheel click.

Do not count on CtlC/CtlV working across all Linux applications, but wheel click will work in virtually everything.

There are a few applications such as nedit where the text has to be currently highlighted before you can paste it.

If you are running KDE, the Klipper (little clipboard icon in the bottom right corner) will remember the last 7 items which had been stored to clipboard. Just click on clipper and click on the item you want to bring back to the clipboard. Once you get used to it, you will wonder how you managed without centre button pasting, and the klipper.

Thursday 22nd April 2004