I was going to describe a bunch of clipboard issues which I believe were all related, some of them I’ve been observing for quite a long time (since 2007 when it was OOo/Go-OO), but then I noticed I cannot reproduce some of them anymore, but I will describe them nevertheless for some background.

I use X, and I tend to use both CLIPBOARD and SELECTION, since I like the ability to select and middle-paste, but at the same time be able to C-c/C-Ins — C-v/S-Ins when selecting things with mouse is tricky. I also use clipboard sync tools, ClipIt at the moment, its predecessor before that, and whatever KDE 3.5 clipboard tool was when I first started to use OpenOffice on Linux.

So, the first issue, which I am no longer able to reproduce, was that OOo/LO tended to quite aggressively deselect text, making it very difficult or impossible to copy-paste by selecting text and middle-clicking elsewhere; for some reason, nothing would be pasted (I suspect, OOo/LO wasn’t holding the SELECTION for long enough). Now, this seems to have been fixed some time ago, since despite myself being absolutely sure it doesn’t work in LO and not using selection copy-paste for years, I was unable to reproduce it this morning.

However, I was able to reproduce another issue, which is that when losing the selection, LO seems to leave random bits of text in there (I am now not sure is it SELECTION or CLIPBOARD, but I suspect SELECTION since it doesn’t seem to happen when I have the sync switched off). E.g.:

— I select a long sentence, middle-paste it somewhere, click elsewhere once, the selection disappears, I middle-paste again, only one word of that sentence gets inserted
— I select the same sentence again, middle-paste it again, click to make selection disappear, middle-paste again, whole sentence gets inserted

Note that it also happens if I select with mouse but copy-paste with clipboard — only as long as clipboard sync is on, it seems. So:

— I select something long with mouse, press C-c, click elsewhere, C-v, only one word gets pasted. Sometimes, the previously copied text would get pasted. Usually, when I select and copy that text *again*, I get the right stuff in the clipboard and it gets pasted as it should.

On a, let’s say, *production* machine where lots of texts get edited in LibreOffice, I had to disable the clipboard sync at all despite the user (not me) liking the middle-paste feature.

I know X clipboards is a terrible mess on its own, and technically clipboard sync is a hack which just happens to mostly work, but still, other apps somehow manage to mostly work while LibreOffice has its issues, and OpenOffice.org has even more of them in the past. I hope someone managed to reproduce this and if not fix it, at least make it more reliable.