st terminal: copy on select and right mouse click to paste

Question

https://st.suckless.org/patches/clipboard/ makes mousewheel to select and paste but I need copy on select of left mouse and then right mouse click to paste.

and to extend, ctrl-v to paste.

I use xorg, archlinux.

How to achieve this?

Solution

Mouse release handling

The routine that turns a mouse event into a paste is brelease() in x.c:

void
brelease(XEvent *e)
{
        if (IS_SET(MODE_MOUSE) && !(e->xbutton.state & forceselmod)) {
                mousereport(e);
                return;
        }

        if (e->xbutton.button == Button2)
                selpaste(NULL);
        else if (e->xbutton.button == Button1)
                mousesel(e, 1);
}

If you want the right button to paste, instead of the middle one, simply change Button2 to Button3 then recompile:

            if (e->xbutton.button == Button3)

Keyboard shortcut definitions

Keyboard shortcuts are in the shortcuts array in config.h. Clipboard-paste is already mapped to Ctrl-Shift-V:

static Shortcut shortcuts[] = {
    /* mask                 keysym          function        argument */
...
    { TERMMOD,              XK_V,           clippaste,      {.i =  0} },

Ctrl-v already has a special meaning in some shells and editors, so you might not want the terminal to intercept it, and prefer to use the existing shortcut. But if you're really determined to have this new shortcut, you'll have to add/change the line as follows:

    { ControlMask,          XK_v,           clippaste,      {.i =  0} },

Note the XK_v now has a lowercase "v", because it's without Shift.

Comments

[Tuyen Pham]

Thanks, but what about copy-on-select?

[VocalFan]

I get copy-on-select without making any changes. Have you applied other patches?

[Tuyen Pham]

You're right, I missed that one. Work like a charm.

[Tuyen Pham]

@JiggyNaga: I have another question, should I create new one? But I'll post here first, I try to copy multiple lines of text from firefox and then try to open vim in st terminal then press ctrl-v but it paste the whole into one line, I expect lines are speparated by newline \b as the original. How to do that with st terminal?

[Tuyen Pham]

I mean \b --> \n

[VocalFan]

Yes, that sounds like a separate question, and the problem may be in Firefox rather than st.

[Tuyen Pham]

Please refer new question here: unix.stackexchange.com/q/471643/256195