[dev] st patches and clipboard issues

From: Philip Rushik <prushik_AT_gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 1 Jan 2015 21:19:24 -0500

Hi everybody,

I started using st at work on my work computers. At work we all use
linux boxes supplied by the company and we don't get full control over
them. I love st, I think it is by far the nicest terminal emulator
available, however, I needed scroll back and copy paste support to
play nice with some of the work software that we use, on of them being
synergy. So, I downloaded st 0.5 and attempted to apply the scroll
back and clipboard paste patches from suckless.org, however, clipboard
patch applies with no issues, but appears to have no effect, and the
scrollback patch fails to apply most of the patch.
I took a look at the patch and figured out what it was trying to do
and made the modifications manually and got it to compile. I am
working on preparing a patch that will apply the changes to the latest
version of st if it will be helpful, however, if an updated patch
already exists, then I will forget about it. All I really have to do
is have it not include the other changes I made and it should be good
to go.

Also, the other issue I want to report is that st does not work with
synergy's clipboard sharing feature. I know the X11 clipboard isn't
wonderful, so normally I would just chalk it up to a sucky clipboard
implementation, or something with synergy. However, synergy's
clipboard seems to work with all other applications, and st exhibits
strange behavior. It actually pastes correctly the first time you try
to paste after the application is opened, then nothing happens after
that, even if the clipboard is cleared and something else it copied.
The same goes for the X11 selection paste as well. For this reason I
think it is a bug in st, even though it is only happening with
synergy.
Anything copied from the same an application on the same machine works
fine, but anything copied from the remote machine using synergy fails
to work correctly.

I have attempted to figure this out, but the mechanism st uses seems
so simple and correct according to what I know of the X11 protocol, so
I can't figure it out.... However, somebody here might know st better
than I do.

That's all I have to say, if you guys want that patch, let me know.
Also, correct me if I am wrong but I think the clipboard patch on
suckless.org is obsolete because it's been merged already into st-0.5.
Not sure what should be done, but seeing the patch on the site is
misleading.

Regards,
--Philip
Received on Fri Jan 02 2015 - 03:19:24 CET