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X11 clipboard and selections
Raised as a usability problem by 18 people on Hacker News over 17 years (2010–2026), in 14 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Accidental selection overwrites clipboard; middle-click pastes unintended contentUnreviewed
20102026- Copy and paste behaviour is unpredictable, needing Shift held or not depending on the app2026-07-23
- Selecting text silently overwrites the clipboard, and Copy menu item does nothing2026-01-17
- Copying does not store content centrally, so content vanishes unless a clipboard manager is run2025-08-15
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 19 complaints
- Copy and paste behaviour is unpredictable, needing Shift held or not depending on the app2026-07-23
- Selecting text silently overwrites the clipboard, and Copy menu item does nothing2026-01-17
- Copying does not store content centrally, so content vanishes unless a clipboard manager is run2025-08-15
- Releasing the mouse button over a window accidentally pastes unintended text and sends it2024-08-30
- Middle-click pastes text accidentally while scrolling, with no global way to disable it2023-10-21
- Selecting text by accident overwrites the clipboard, and middle-click pastes unintended content2023-10-21
- Middle click unintentionally pastes highlighted text from other apps into the focused app2023-10-21
- Accidental middle-click silently pastes text into a root shell, destroying the system2023-10-21
- Accidentally pastes because highlighting text triggers paste; hard to avoid2022-11-01
- Users accidentally lose copied content because clipboard ownership ends when the source app closes2022-10-25
- Clicking a GitHub URL auto-selects it, so copying it to a terminal is confusing2019-09-14
- Primary selection paste fails in some web textareas and inspector text fields2019-09-13
- Selecting text silently replaces what Ctrl-V pastes, and selection vanishes before paste2019-09-13
- Selecting text overwrites the clipboard and middle-click paste is hard to hit2019-04-18
- Users copy to one clipboard and paste from the other, so paste fails2018-06-05
- Selecting text overwrites the clipboard needed for pasting, making paste replace the wrong content2013-08-27
- Accidentally pastes text unnoticed; copy-paste behaves inconsistently across applications and consoles2013-08-27
- Hard to apply copy-paste reliably when remoting into a Mac2013-04-07
- Copy and paste behaves inconsistently across applications, with some apps keeping their own clipboard2010-07-22