(no subject)

[brownbetty]

OMG, a community for the command line, my favourite! I've had Ubuntu or flavours of it on my computers for about a year now, and am still very much a newb. I only figured out what screen was for six months ago, and have been slowly learning its mysteries.

For those who, like me, don't like to use their mouse more than they have to, xsel can be very useful. It's a command-line interface to the X cut-buffer, and can empty, access, or change the contents. (If you go to the programmer's page, he in fact says it does something much more complicated, but if you're willing to settle for simple and inaccurate, that's what it does.)


If, for example, you wrote a Yuletide story in a text file, and don't want to have to open it to copy and paste it into the web form,

xsel -ib < Yuletide.txt

and your story is in your cut buffer, like magic!

Alternately, to paste the part of the email you selected to a text file,

xsel -op > text.txt

without opening a text editor.

Xsel allows you to use your Primary, Secondary, or clipBoard selections. I find -p and -b are the ones I use most often. (I'm not entirely clear on what -s is.)

Xsel is in the repositories for *buntu, or can be found here.

Comments

[cheyinka]

That's amazing! For NaNoWriMo I was lamenting that there isn't a way to upload a file anymore, but instead the validator is a box into which you paste your novel; this would have made me happy to have. (But now I have it for next year!)