UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I'm using Red Hat 8 and I'm really fustrated with cut and paste.

When I am viewing a URL in emacs I cannot paste it into the browser address window.

Yesterday, I tried VI (or was it VIM?) and it recognized it as a URL and allowed me to right mouse click on it and brought up the browser with that URL automically.

Sometimes, in emacs or VI (but not today so far) a little window in the bottom right hand corner of the screen pops up (but never when I need it) and asks if I want to open the URL in the browser. But since I rebooted, it does not seem to be working.

Is there a way that I don't have to manually type in a long URL that is already in emacs? emacs does not seem to be able to cut so any other application can read it.

Cutting, copying and pasting within emacs works fine.

And what about drag and drop? In windows, I can run windows explorer and drag files from windows explorer and drop them in emacs and emacs will open up the file.

I cannot get that to work with Konquerer. Should it? Is emacs at fault or Konquerer? I've heard about nautilaus, will that implement drag and drop into emacs?

Is there a file view that emulates windows explorer better than konquerer? Konquere does not seem to display two panes where the left hand pane is a list of directories only.

Thanks,
siegfried

I'm not sure about your particular scenario. But I can say that historically, X Windows (which is the GUI underbelly of GNOME and KDE, amongst other windowing systems) had two buffers. There was the buffer that the terminal window used, and the buffer that just about everything else used.

Ridiculous, no?

On my Sun machine, I actually have an extra row of keys on the lefthand side. So if I'm copying between terminal window A and window B, all I have to do is select in A, then click my middle button in B and my selection is pasted.

But if I want to paste into, say, Mozilla, I have to select in A, then hit my "Copy" key, then hit my "Paste" key in Mozilla (I think control-V works, too).

It's just another weirdness in the long running saga that is UNIX. My guess is, your emacs is run in a terminal window. And you're trying to copy/paste between it and a web browser or some other application.

This may explain your problem. You might have to use "Control-Insert" to copy and "Shift-Insert" to paste, if you have a PC and are running Linux. Play with it a bit.

Odd, isn't it?
-Mike