It's as if there are two different system clipboards (stash places for copied text), with two different ways of accessing them.
I've noticed this for quite some time but never been able to narrow it down to a question.
Here's How You Can Recreate This
Use the xclip command to copy some text on the clipboard like the following:
$ echo this is a test | xclip
When you do that, you can access that stashed data only using Shift-Insert.
- You cannot access that stashed data via
Ctrl-V - You cannot access that stashed data via ContextMenu (right-click) and Paste - The paste option will be greyed out because it doesn't think there is anything on the system clipboard, or it will have older data that was copied to the clipboard.
To Prove That
To prove that true, after running the command above you can attempt to paste the text using Ctrl-V and ContextMenu Paste. Neither will work.
However, Shift-Insert (which is an old key combination, possibly originated in WordStar) will indeed paste the text that is stashed by xclip.
Note: If you have a keyboard that doesn't have a dedicated Insert key then you'll need to turn your num-lock key on and use the one that should be located on your numeric keypad.
Another Thing To Try
I also noticed that to get the text from xclip I can run the following command:
$ xclip -o
However, I discover that at times the stashed data that is displayed from xclip is entirely different data than the data that I get from Ctrl-V or ContextMenu-Paste
Can anyone explain this? Where is data stashed? Is there only one clipboard?
