As most of you probably know, X has several different mechanisms for copy-paste, used by different applications in different ways. I know some people who use them deliberately, juggling two pieces of text in different clipboards at once, but for me, it’s always just been annoying. When I copy something, be it by Gnome C-c, emacs C-w, or selecting it in an xterm, I then want to be able to paste it again, no matter what mechanism I use.

I’ve long thought it should be trivial to write a daemon that synchronizes the clipboards, and it turns out that indeed someone’s done so: Autocutsel. And now, it turns out there are in fact at least three clipboards, but by running it twice, syncing between two pairs, I’ve no longer had the issue of pasting from the wrong clipboard and having to remember how I copied that URL to give to someone. My .xsession incant is simply:

autocutsel -fork
autocutsel -selection PRIMARY -fork