Quoted William Mortensen <william5@u.washington.edu>:
On Oct 11, 2008, at 9:42 PM, Dave Ray wrote:
On the graphics side, I re-tested and have some details. I can copy from Preview to Gimp, but not vise-versa. I tried every possible way I could think of that might work. After opening and selecting an image in Gimp, I tried just selecting an area and then using OS-X Copy; tried selecting an area, using Edit -> Copy from within Gimp, then using OS-X copy. Tried all these with command-C in place of the OS-X menu copy. None of these combinations would paste into Preview or Photoshop from Gimp.
No no no. You're still doing it wrong. :-) With an application like Gimp that has its own Copy menu item (in the menu bar in the Gimp window), you don't use OS X's Copy at all. So you should just hit ctrl- C (aka Gimp's Copy) and then switch to Preview or whatever and paste.
That's correct. I usually use the Gimp Edit->Copy menu, and then the Mac Preview Edit->Paste. We tried to make it more sensible than my original idea of having Copy Primary, and Copy Clipboard menu items. It does a greedy (automatic) copy of the CLIPBOARD selection whenever the CLIPBOARD selection is lost from another client owning it. This is just like a standard X11 clipboard manager, hence the inability to fight with xclipboard and similar programs, which do similar things. You can however disable the pasteboard proxying in the X11 preferences of CLIPBOARD if you want.
You only use OS X's Copy (command-C) for applications that don't have their own Copy menu item, like xterm. This difference exists because there are two different mechanisms for supporting copy and paste in X11, which is why Jeremy keeps talking about CLIPBOARD vs. PRIMARY.
That's a very clear way of putting it -- thank you :) The inverse of copying from say the Gimp to Preview works like this: When you copy text or an image from a Mac app the proxy will set itself as owner of the X11 PRIMARY and CLIPBOARD (depending on if you're using the standard XQuartz preferences), which thereby allows pasting into an X11 app with a middle-button, key shortcut, or menu. George -- http://people.freedesktop.org/~gstaplin/