At long last: Mac copy, KDE paste
I happen to be crazed enough to run KDE on my Mactop. Actually, I run it for one application: Kile. Yes, Kile. Though I would prefer to use something like LyX, the main reason I suffer LaTeX is the convenience of having your papers and, maybe even, thesis formatted to specification automatically. LyX doesn’t work on LaTeX files directly, however, so I am paranoid about whether it will format everything exactly the same as LaTeX, and anyway I find LaTeX hacking in LyX a bit clumsy. So at some point I switched to working with LaTeX directly, but the general philosophy of LaTeX editor user interface design seems to be: Let’s stuff as many thousands of little toolbar buttons as we can for all the obscure commands, environments, and, especially mathematical symbols.
Except for Kile. Which still sucks since it doesn’t have WYSIWYG or at least real-time preview, but at least they figured out that dynamic command completion is really frigging useful. So that’s what I use.
But there’s one big problem: I can’t copy from a Mac application to Kile. Or any KDE application for that matter. As the following post discusses
http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macports-users/2007-July/004451.html
you can paste to other X11 applications using the mouse middle button (option-click) (see http://developer.apple.com/qa/qa2001/qa1232.html), but it doesn’t work for KDE apps. Unfortunately the post hasn’t been answered, but I finally figured out a not-so-odious work-around: Just run xclipboard.
Yes, old, crusty, xclipboard in all of its Athena widget glory scoops up your native Mac copying activity and magically makes it available to KDE applications with the usual Control-v.
So that’s why today’s UNIX GUI distros still dump hundreds of old and often redundant X applications. Sometimes you actually need them!