On Sunday, December 10, 2017 1:50:19 AM MST Matthias Apitz wrote: > El día sábado, diciembre 09, 2017 a las 01:17:31p. m. -0700, Stephen Dowdy escribió: > > There's a lot of "cut/paste" mechanisms in play. > > > > X11 has a Primary and Secondary buffer, but there's also a Clipboard. > > selecting text via mouse in something like xterm puts that text into the > > Primary buffer. Using CTRL-C/V uses the Clipboard. (this is all > > generalizations). > > > > You can use a tool like 'xsel' or 'xclip' to manipulate all three of those > > buffers:> > > To see what's in each buffer: > > for buf in primary secondary clipboard; do printf "\n[${buf}]\n"; xsel > > -o --${buf} ; done; printf "\n" > For "my" xsel (xsel 0.04 23072002) the syntax was: > > for buf in PRIMARY SECONDARY CLIPBOARD; do printf "\n[${buf}]\n"; xsel -p -s > ${buf} ; done; printf "\n" > > Thanks anyway for this pointer; > > matthias For my xsel 1.2.0 it's possible to use one of -p, -s, or -b for Primary, Secondary, or clipBoard selections. Trying various combinations of selection and Ctrl-C I see that none of the selections are affected. Even though I don't use Thunderbird, but I do use SeaMonkey, on a hunch I closed that window and the buffers appear to behave normally, even after re- opening SeaMonkey. For now. But at least I know the culprit! ... or I thought I did... Just before sending this reply I tried again and neither selection nor clipboard work, regardless of whether SeaMonkey is running or not.