How to set up clipboard?

User Support
#1

While on a brink of sanity I’m wondering how clipboard should work in doom emacs. You can’t put EVERY word into clipboard that gets deleted…

But putting this (setq x-select-enable-clipboard nil) makes X11 clipboard not work at all…

#2

My current solution is to disable clipboard/kill-ring transfers AND bind Ctrl+Shift+C and Ctrl+Shift+v to copy/paste selected blocks to X11 clipboard.

;; don't put deleted strings to X11 clipboard
(setq select-enable-clipboard nil)

;; copying and pasting selected blocks in visual mode to and from X11 clipboard
(map! "S-C-c" #'clipboard-kill-ring-save)
(map! "S-C-v" #'clipboard-yank)

Could this be considered a sane default?

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#3
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#7

I know I’m late to this, but I think it looks perfectly sensible! Not sure about as a default though.

If you just want word deletions to not copy then you could rebind kill-word to a delete-word command, something like this:

(defun delete-word (arg)
  "Kill characters forward until encountering the end of a word.
With argument ARG, do this that many times."
  (interactive "p")
  (delete-region (point) (progn (forward-word arg) (point))))

(map! "<remap> <kill-word>" #'delete-word
      "<remap> <kill-backward-word" #'doom/delete-backward-word)
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#8

For what it’s worth, here’s my approach to try & make Emacs’ copy/paste fit my mental model a bit better: dotfiles/stow/emacs/.doom.d/mine/clipboard.el at 003042fbc99e1c3233f6f3a4714495b38d7be580 · jdelStrother/dotfiles · GitHub

I use simpleclip-mode to disconnect emacs’ kill ring from the system pasteboard by default, and then add some bindings so that user-activated copy operations (eg selecting a region and hitting y) still get synced with the system pasteboard.

#9

If you replace simpleclip with manually setting select-enable-clipboard to nil, and re-enabling it during relevant commands (through let in a rebind), then it should work in emacs-everywhere.

I checked and simpleclip also does this, but it also disables x-select-enable-clipboard (presumably to support older versions), and temporarily replaces the interprogram-*-functions. I’m guessing the last part is what breaks emacs-everywhere.

maybe unrelated, but here's what I do in my own config.

I use "+y to yank to clipboard, although in the future I may to rebind somehow like JdelStrother does. Note that the advice is needed for these +default commands, because they presently don’t accept a register (and I can’t imagine not wanting them in my clipboard manager anyhow).

(after! evil
  (setq select-enable-clipboard nil)
  (defadvice! my-force-enable-clipboard (orig-fun &rest args)
    "enables clipboard sync for commands that benefit from it.
E.g. for commands that copy particularly useful text."
    :around '(+default/yank-buffer-path
              +default/yank-buffer-contents
              +default/yank-buffer-path-relative-to-project)
    (let ((select-enable-clipboard t))
      (apply orig-fun args))))

(the (after! evil is unnecessary, I just assume I’ll find clipboard sync more useful if evil isn’t available, since I won’t have "+)

apologies if I came across as rude or pushy w/ my suggestion!

P.S: here's how an operator definition for a rebind w/ the `select-enable-clipboard` setting could look like (based on Jdel's posted config) 
(evil-define-operator jds-evil-yank-to-system (beg end type register yank-handler)
  "Save the characters in motion into the kill-ring."
  :move-point nil
  :repeat nil
  (interactive "<R><x><y>")
  (let ((select-enable-clipboard t))
    (evil-yank beg end type register yank-handler)))
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#10

thanks, I’ll give it a try. After over a year since posting it (and after recovering my sanity) I’ve grown used to having two separate clipboarde to stash different information. However, y keybinding is much easier to use than ctrl shfit c, so I may still come around.

#11

Nice, thankyou! I’ve dropped simpleclip-mode and updated my dotfiles with your suggestion: dotfiles/stow/emacs/.doom.d/mine/clipboard.el at 6e14f350500bd3bc1b0b79f25b9a0330840faf19 · jdelStrother/dotfiles · GitHub

1 Like
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