A Better Linux / Gnome Clipboard Experience

Linux has two different types of “clipboards”. I love the approach and switch back and forth depending on what I'm doing. But, the copy/paste clipboard (ctrl-c and ctrl-v) acts a little strange in Linux and particularly in Gnome. It seems unreliable to me.

Typically the linux clipboard only persists while an application is running. So, if you copy in Firefox then close it, the clipboard is “forgotten”. Gnome has it's own clipboard manager that I think was designed to help with this, but it's somewhat unreliable. For example, if you copy from Firefox then close it, your clipboard is forgotten. If you copy from gEdit and close it, it's remembered. I'm not sure if it's app specific, just Gnome apps, or what exactly. Ultimately, I set out to solve the problem for myself and this is what I came up with.

It's fairly simple, really. You need to do two things. First, disable the gnome clipboard manager and then install a new one. There are several options including xclipboard, glipper, and parcellite. The latter is my preference.

First we need to disable the built in Gnome clipboard manager. Open a terminal and run the following command.

gconftool-2 --set /apps/gnome_settings_daemon/plugins/clipboard/active 0 --type bool

Next, we install our preferred clipboard manager. I use parcellite, which I installed with the following command.

sudo apt-get install parcellite

That's it, you're clipboard might work more as you expect now.