Ruarí Ødegaard

Optimising Parcellite for use under Ubuntu

Sunday, December 4, 2011 1:13:13 PM

parcellite, clipboard, clipboard managers

If you are hitting the problem of Gnome or Unity styling being lost when shutting down Opera you may be looking at alternative clipboard managers. Personally I would recommend Diodon (see the previous post for how to install it). Diodon is a good choice because it is simple, yet powerful and integrates nicely with Unity and Gnome. Another alternative that is frequently mentioned is Parcellite, however this requires some manual tweaks to get it working nicely under Ubuntu. If this sounds like too much, stick with Diodon or look at one of the many other alternatives.

In Ubuntu Parcellite doesn't launch automatically after you log in to Unity or Gnome, so you will need add it to the list of "Startup Applications". To do this you should locate "Startup Applications" by typing its name. In the dialog that appears add a new entry just like the example screen shot below. You should then log out of your desktop environment and back in again.

Secondly, if you run Unity you may want a system tray icon for Parcellite. This is not strictly necessary but it will allow you to have one click access old clipboard data, which suits some people more than keyboard shortcuts. To enable this you will need to add Parcellite to Unity's system tray panel white list.

This can be done by entering the following as your regular user in a terminal:

gsettings set com.canonical.Unity.Panel systray-whitelist "$(gsettings get com.canonical.Unity.Panel systray-whitelist | sed -e "s/]$/, 'Parcellite']/")"

Alternatively to white list all applications you would enter:

gsettings set com.canonical.Unity.Panel systray-whitelist "['all']"

Note: Unity 2D in Ubuntu 11.04 does not support the "['all']" setting, so you will need to use the first command to specifically insert 'Parcellite'.

P.S. If you ever need to restore the Unity system tray panel default white list (from Ubuntu 11.10), issue this command:

gsettings set com.canonical.Unity.Panel systray-whitelist "['JavaEmbeddedFrame', 'Wine', 'scp-dbus-service', 'Update-notifier']"

Gnome or Unity styling lost on Opera shut down?Has a crash on startup left you feeling blue?

Comments

FransFrenzie # Sunday, December 4, 2011 1:36:18 PM

Originally posted by ruario:

Secondly, if you run Unity you may want a system tray icon for Parcellite. This is not strictly necessary for basic functionality but it will allow you to access old clipboard data, which is a nice extra benefit. To enable this you will need to add Parcellite to the Unity's system tray panel white list.

In all fairness, Ctrl + Alt + H is much faster and more at hand while you're using Ctrl + C and Ctrl + V, so I'd argue you don't need the icon. You can access the preferences through Ctrl + Alt + P in order to change such shortcuts. I'd even go a step strong and argue that hiding useless icon pollution like Parcellite's is one of Unity's only features I don't at least slightly dislike*, even if it is completely by accident and I would dislike it if it hid e.g. Skype or Pidgin.

* For example, I think the global menu is great — at least on my netbook, less sure about larger screens — but the fact that it's hidden kills all of the advantage. In fact I recently booted into Ubuntu 10.04 on our other netbook and I found that, despite its defects, it's significantly superior to Unity in many ways. I hadn't used it in 158 days (or at least not checked for updates, which probably amounts to about the same thing) and it was like a breath of fresh air. In fact I even found myself enjoying Windows 7 the other day, which is ironic because one of the reasons I switched to Ubuntu in the first place is that I thought it was a better upgrade path from XP. Of course I'd hardly give up on all the awesomeness of Linux due to Unity or Gnome 3, but I think it was a good reminder.

[/hijack]

Ruarí Ødegaardruario # Sunday, December 4, 2011 2:19:30 PM

Since you are a Parcellite fan, have you looked at the fork, ClipIt?

FransFrenzie # Sunday, December 4, 2011 2:53:48 PM

I'm not attached to any particular solution, though I prefer something less Unity-specific so I can be more consistent across DEs. I've only been using Parcellite for a relatively short time: http://fransdejonge.com/2011/03/parcellite/

Ruarí Ødegaardruario # Sunday, December 4, 2011 3:27:57 PM

Fair enough, I switched to suggesting Diodon because it is easier to setup and I have no idea about the technical capabilities of those who stumble across my previous blog post.

I was tempted not to bother mentioning alternative clipboard managers at all (I don't generally use one) but some people are bound miss it.

I alternate between primary buffer and clipboard if I need a little history. For any more history I use a text editor as a place to store old text as I always have one open.

Ruarí Ødegaardruario # Sunday, December 4, 2011 3:37:41 PM

gnome-settings-daemon clipboard manager is very lightweight and doesn't work quite the same way as more featureful clipboard managers like Parcellite and Diodon. It only tries to solve one problem and that is clipboard contents lost when an application shuts down. So it only asks apps that are shutting down for their clipboard contents and ignores everything else. Parcellite, Diodon and most others monitor all clipboard changes and take over everything.

What gnome-settings-daemon tries to do would probably be good enough for me, if it weren't for the fact that it crashes a lot.

If you know of an alternative that only does what gnome-settings-daemon's clipboard manager does, I would be interested to hear about it.

FransFrenzie # Sunday, December 4, 2011 4:23:51 PM

You could try setting clipboard history to 1?

Presently Parcellite consumes 2MB memory and a far more negligible amount of CPU time. Personally I rarely need something more than 10 clipboard entries ago, but just to be sure I've got it set to 25 (which may be the default; I don't remember).

Ruarí Ødegaardruario # Sunday, December 4, 2011 9:16:37 PM

Originally posted by Frenzie:

In all fairness, Ctrl + Alt + H is much faster and more at hand while you're using Ctrl + C and Ctrl + V, so I'd argue you don't need the icon.

Ok, I cleaned up the text in the main blog post.

Ruarí Ødegaardruario # Sunday, December 4, 2011 9:59:49 PM

Originally posted by Frenzie:

I'd even go a step strong and argue that hiding useless icon pollution like Parcellite's is one of Unity's only features I don't at least slightly dislike

In fairness to Parcellite you could hide this anyway with "-n, --no-icon".

FransFrenzie # Sunday, December 4, 2011 10:04:02 PM

Originally posted by Ruarí Ødegaard:

Ok, I cleaned up the text in the main blog post.

Haha, cheers. That certainly takes care of my complaint that you don't need the mouse to access it's "advanced" functionality.

On a completely unrelated note, Windows 3 had a clipboard viewer in some prominent location, but it's been removed since Vista.

Unregistered user # Wednesday, January 25, 2012 4:31:46 PM

pandisvezia writes: Hi, Everything is fine about Diodon, it helps us by keeping a history of all bits of text we copy. However it lacks an important and elementary function: possibility to paste all the clipboard history at once. If you, or anyone here, has a positive experience or a workaround on this problem I would like to hear. Thank you!

FransFrenzie # Wednesday, January 25, 2012 7:11:29 PM

I suppose you should try a different clipboard manager in that case? Btw, what's the use case? I've never even thought of doing that.

Unregistered user # Wednesday, January 25, 2012 9:18:56 PM

pandisvezia writes: I already tried some: klipper, glippy and some others that I don't remember their name but I couldn't find such a function. It would be useful for me because I'm studying german and during my reading sessions on the web I come across plenty of new words. I don't want to let them go so I would like copy/paste all of them to keep/make a track of my vocabulary. Moreover I use the list in text file to repeat the new words with an app, for example ANKI.

FransFrenzie # Wednesday, January 25, 2012 10:10:14 PM

I'm afraid all I was able to come up with was your own question.

Unregistered user # Wednesday, January 25, 2012 11:08:16 PM

pandisvezia writes: yes, that's right! :) but I saw this one as well: http://askubuntu.com/questions/97886/is-there-a-clipboard-manager-with-paste-all-functionality. it's quite strange that while these programs keep a history of our copy actions they are not providing us a chance to transfer all at once to another place. In fact that would be the most significant point of an app like Klipper, Diodon, etc; seeing and using the history as a whole. there are some apps on windows but on ubuntu I haven't seen one yet.

FransFrenzie # Thursday, January 26, 2012 9:35:02 AM

Well sure, there were a bunch of the same type of questions here and there.

Btw, ClipIt, a Parcellite fork, has the ability to select multiple items in a manage history screen. I haven't installed it, so I wouldn't know if that's only for deletion or also for copying. Might be worth a look?

Unregistered user # Tuesday, February 7, 2012 4:07:33 PM

pandisvezia writes: Thank you for the suggestion but unfortunately neither ClipIt has this feature. I wrote them on their feature requests page on Sourceforge. Hope they take it into consideration and implement in the next releases.

Unregistered user # Friday, January 18, 2013 4:09:44 PM

Anonymous writes: Done! Parcellite 1.1.3 has this feature called save-all on the menu. http://parcellite.sourceforge.net/

FransFrenzie # Saturday, January 19, 2013 6:13:30 PM

Nice!