Hello Craig, On 8/30/20, Craig Sanders via luv-main <luv-main@luv.asn.au> wrote:
On Tue, Aug 18, 2020 at 04:54:08PM +1000, Mark Trickett wrote:
Many thanks for your excellent posts, I am learning more. However I have Debian 10, nominally up to date, and it has Wayland with Gnome as the desktop. I am finding it very frustrating that I cannot copy and paste to and from the XTerm window.
Sorry, i don't use Wayland, have no idea what could be going wrong with this.
I can't see the point of Wayland. TBH, it seems like the systemd of X - a half-arsed crappy partial implementation of only the stuff that the devs personally use because there's no way that anyone else could ever need anything they don't use.
I did not choose Wayland, nor systemd, but that is now the Debian defaults. There are good reasons behind the changes, or at least I have seen some support that I will concur with on why Wayland over xwindows. However I do not find benefit in systemd, the current install (Debian 10.5) is missing a piece of firmware, but I cannot read the message in time during boot, nor find it in the logs. I think it is for the network on the motherboard.
Also, CADT syndrome: never fix anything. toss out the old garbage, make way for the shiny new garbage. Fixing bugs is boring. Reimplementing from scratch every year or two is fun and exciting and it'll be perfect. For sure, this time.
I used to be able to do with earlier terminal emulation under the XWindows system. I used it to be able to copy text from a terminal into an email, and commands back from email, ensuring that I did not make typos.
That's weird. i'd be surprised if Wayland was actually incapable of doing something as basic as copy and paste between terminal windows, so it's probably a bug or a configuration error.
From my reading of pages found by a google search, there is a choice by the development team based on (in)security of casual copy and paste. I thought that it was likely a configuration issue, but cannot find. I tried a number of teminals, but not a lot, to find one that appears to be reasonable. I still need to do more research, when life leaves the time from the real world.
Maybe try a different terminal instead of xterm. There are dozens to choose from. I mostly use roxterm (full-height apart from the space used by xfce4-panel, full-width, approx 250x60 depending on font size - great for viewing log files), but sometimes I use xfce4-terminal if i want a tall, narrow window (80 or 132 x 60) to fit beside something else.
I do understand that there can be security issues if used without a measure of care and thoughtful, but it also has much merit when coping with some of the regular expressions that come up as examples in email and on web pages.
the "security issues" comes from blindly executing code/commands that you don't understand.
That is why it is not implemented, even for those of us who do carefully look over such before copying and executing. I cannot make sense of a line of perl at this time, but there are some folks I will trust, such as you and Russel Coker. I do not expect you to be perfect, but that you do know more than I, and from what I have seen, not malicious. I do try to comprehend even your examples first, but have to trust that you do know that much more in the subject of concern.
treat everything as just an example that needs further research. never execute something posted by someone else(*) unless you know what it does and how and why.
(*) ANYONE else. even if they're trustworthy and not malicious, they could be wrong, they might have made a mistake.
Anyone can make a mistake, unfortunately some people are a mistake.
craig
Regards, Mark Trickett