How to copy text from Emacs to another application on Linux

Question

When I cut (kill) text in Emacs 22.1.1 (in its own window on X, in KDE, on Kubuntu), I can\'t paste (yank) it in any other application.

Answer 1

The difficulty with copy and paste in Emacs is that you want it to work independently from the internal kill/yank, and you want it to work both in terminal and the gui. There are existing robust solutions for either terminal or gui, but not both. After installing xsel (e.g. sudo apt-get install xsel), here is what I do for copy and paste to combine them:

(defun copy-to-clipboard ()
  (interactive)
  (if (display-graphic-p)
      (progn
        (message "Yanked region to x-clipboard!")
        (call-interactively 'clipboard-kill-ring-save)
        )
    (if (region-active-p)
        (progn
          (shell-command-on-region (region-beginning) (region-end) "xsel -i -b")
          (message "Yanked region to clipboard!")
          (deactivate-mark))
      (message "No region active; can't yank to clipboard!")))
  )

(defun paste-from-clipboard ()
  (interactive)
  (if (display-graphic-p)
      (progn
        (clipboard-yank)
        (message "graphics active")
        )
    (insert (shell-command-to-string "xsel -o -b"))
    )
  )

(global-set-key [f8] 'copy-to-clipboard)
(global-set-key [f9] 'paste-from-clipboard)