On Thu, Jun 13, 2024 at 03:42:27PM +1000, Charlie wrote: > For completeness. Had tried right and left at same time on touchpad of > laptop. As it worked years ago.
Pressing left+right buttons simultaneously was indeed one of the hacks that people used to mimic the middle button in some X11 setups. I haven't seen that in practice in quite some time. I think people mostly stopped implementing it, because two-button mice (without scroll wheels) fell out of the market. > Didn't think the touchpad had a middle button. Don't know why? I forgot about laptops with touchpads. Unfortunately, this is not an area that I've had to research, so I don't know what the current X and Wayland implementations do to emulate three-button mice. Maybe someone else knows, or maybe you can find some modern-day documentation about it on the Internet. > This works on a Dell Vostro laptop. > > Highlight the text in xterm with the left of the touchpad. > Cursor in highlighted text, press bottom middle of touchpad. > > This alters the block highlight. By pressing the middle of the > bottom of the touchpad: highlights only the lines in xterm. > > Go to text editor, in my instance: Kate. Place cursor where to paste. > Dialogue box comes up. Select paste and it does that. > > Doesn't work in LyX but if placed in text editor Kate first, can be > copied Ctrl+C, then in LyX, Ctrl+V. Since you mention xterm, you might want to read the xterm(1) man page and what it has to say about SELECT/PASTE and specifically what it says about the selectToClipboard option. Apparently you can configure xterm so that what you highlight with the mouse goes into the clipboard instead of the selection. Then, you could paste it with Shift-Insert in another application, probably. I haven't tried that myself. Another thing you could try (this one, I actually tested): 1) Install the xclip package. 2) Highlight (select) the text with the left button. 3) Run this command, anywhere in your X session: xclip -o -selection primary | xclip -i -selection clipboard 4) Focus to the target application by clicking/mouse-moving. 5) Press Shift-Insert to paste the clipboard. Step 3 copies the highlighted text from the selection to the clipboard, and step 5 pastes from the clipboard. This works in a large number of programs, including xterm, rxvt-unicode, and Google Chrome. If you find this useful, you will probably want to shorten step 3. You could set up a shell alias that runs this, or a shell key binding that runs it, or a Window Manager key binding that runs it, or any other clever thing you can come up with.
