RE: [NEWBIE] How to put text onto system-wide clipboard?

["Freddie Unpenstein" <fredderic excite com>]

> What I want to do is put user selected text onto the (a?) 
> system-wide clipboard. How to do this using GTK+? BTW, I come from
> Windows world.

Both Windows and Linux have GUI-wide (NOT system-wide) clipboards.  In Windows, seperating the System from 
the GUI is almost impossible.  But good old command.com (or cmd.exe) has no built-in clipboard support, what 
limited clipboard capability it does have is provided by a GUI wrapper basically similar to xterm in Linux.  
Linux consoles (similar to the old DOS which is still the underlying operating system in all Windows versions 
from ME back, and is still provided by the newer WinNT-based versions) allow you to run a utility which 
provides fairly decent cut-and-paste support (better than DOS does, anyhow).  This clipboard, however, is 
distinct from the GUI one, and I believe, so are the clipboards of other GUI's (Linux can run more than one X 
server, remember?).  However, keeping in mind that consoles and extra GUI's are a Linux feature which Windows 
doesn't provide, and which a user never even has to know exists to use Linux fully, I don't think it 
particularly matters muc
 h.  ;)

The short of it is that in both Linux and Windows, there is no "system-wide" clipboard (there's no clipboard 
in the Windows console-level step-by-step boot before the GUI starts).  However, there is a lovely clipboard 
mechanism provided by the X GUI, and supported by GTK+.  You can find the API here:

http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/gtk/gtk-Clipboards.html


Fredderic

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