Take the 2-minute tour ×

I'm constantly frustrated by the two separate clipboards in X/Gnome. I'm constantly doing things like control-C to copy, and then middle-click to paste, and getting the wrong data. Or select something, then go where I want to paste it, and selecting what I want to paste over, only to lose my first selection!

Is there any way to merge these two clipboards?

Update: Parcellite comes close, but pasting over a selection is really essential. Is there a way to disable select-as-copy in X?

share|improve this question
It's been 3 years. Do we have solution to this problem? –  Varun Mar 20 '13 at 13:05
Nope. For various other reasons, I've switched to KDE recently. klipper is acceptable for kde + synergy, but I know of no usable solution for gnome + synergy. Problems with autocutsel, parcellite and glipper are all laid out in existing answers and comments on this question. –  TREE Mar 20 '13 at 17:16

8 Answers 8

autocutsel is what you want to sync between the primary X/X11 clipboard and the Gnome/GTK clipboard! Here's how:

$ autocutsel &
$ autocutsel -s PRIMARY & 


share|improve this answer
Worked great. Thanks! –  Liam Sep 22 '12 at 17:43
Hell yeah ! add this to my .bashrc –  Natim Feb 26 '13 at 10:47

"autocutsel" will not do what you want.

This issue has pissed for over a decade, till i found a fix a few weeks back.

You need to do this:

apt-get install parcellite

Right click go on the icon and go to the "Preference"

Check the following:

  • Use Copy (Ctrl-C)
  • Use Primary (Selection)
  • Sync clipboards

Warren Brian Noronha

share|improve this answer
parcellite appears to successfully merge the clipboards. It does not solve the latter problem, which is pasting over a selection. I like that I can paste a single buffer with either control-v or middle button. I do not like (and would like to disable) selection as copy. –  TREE Apr 12 '10 at 13:28

It's not gnome, but Klipper from KDE has an option to do this. I'm getting frustrated by the lack of it in gnome as well.

share|improve this answer
I tried Glipper, which had a decent workaround for the selection problem: when you've destroyed your previous selection by selecting something else, Glipper lets you access the history and get back what you had. However, it interferes with Synergy clipboard sharing, which is a non-starter. :( –  TREE Jul 2 '10 at 12:33

I think autocutsel will solve your problem. Most distro package cleverly as "autocutsel". In ubuntu it's in the universe repository.

share|improve this answer
This looked really promising, but running it doesn't appear to change anything. :( –  TREE Nov 12 '09 at 20:36
Can you give an exact example? Copy from X (using ctrl-C) to Y (using middle mouse button)? I think I may not understand your exact situation. –  DaveParillo Nov 13 '09 at 6:12

As of 0.9.2-1 (Debian Squeeze), parcellite seems to be merging the two clipboards (Primary & Selection), while autocutsel 0.9.0-1 does work most of the time, but fails randomly.

share|improve this answer

loliclip (current name: xcmenu) does what I was searching for when I bumped into this question. It effectively disables copy on mouse selection by forcing primary buffer to be in sync with clipboard. With default config after start this program you can copy by Ctrl+C (or Ctrl+Insert) and paste it by Ctrl+V (or Shift+Insert).

share|improve this answer

Problem 2 happens because both copying by selecting and pasting with middle-click move text to/from the same buffer, the primary selection buffer. To change that, I think you would have to modify and recompile Xorg. But I could be wrong.

It would be easier to solve both problems without requiring pasting with middle-click. This would require explicit copy/paste, like what Ctrl + C / Ctrl + V do for desktop apps, but it would work for any X app.

We need a program that copies the X selection to the clipboard, and another program that pastes the clipboard to the cursor. Then you can bind those to some universal key combos. I don't know if there are any programs like that yet.

share|improve this answer

So I actually like to keep the various copy buffers separate, and occasionally sync from one or the other (like when I'm using keepass2.) So if I want to move something from the clipboard to the primary copy (middle mouse button) buffer, I'll do:

xclip -o -selection clipboard | xclip -i 
share|improve this answer

Your Answer


