XClipboard.jl: Copy and paste in Julia on XWindows systems
This is a partial translation of Ed Rosten's x_clipboard, a nearly complete demonstration of how to use the clipboard and drag and drop in X11.
(See also here for a nice overview.)
At this point, only pasting into Julia is implemented.
Copy-and-paste in general (and on X11 in particular) is actually a rather tedious experience. It would be great if there were a higher level, preferably cross-platform library which took care of this, but as of mid-2013, I couldn't find one.
Note that Julia Base has a clipboard() command that already works for
text-based copying. xclipboard() is meant to allow any kind of
data to be pasted, but currently, the parsing of non-text data is up
to the individual.
Functions
xclipboard([t1, [t2, ...]]) Get the current contents of the X11
clipboard, optionally specifying target
types.
xclipboard_targets() Get a list of possible target types
for the current selection
decodemime(::MIME{mime}, x) Used to decode a particular target
type. Currently handles text, and
returns other target types as raw
byte arrays.Example
julia> using XClipboard
julia> xclipboard_targets()
10-element Array{MIME{mime},1}:
MIME type TIMESTAMP
MIME type TARGETS
MIME type MULTIPLE
MIME type SAVE_TARGETS
MIME type UTF8_STRING
MIME type COMPOUND_TEXT
MIME type TEXT
MIME type STRING
MIME type text/plain;charset=utf-8
MIME type text/plain
julia> xclipboard()
"Julia: A fresh approach to technical computing"
julia> xclipboard("UTF8_STRING")
"Julia: A fresh approach to technical computing"
julia> xclipboard("text/plain")
"Julia: A fresh approach to technical computing"
julia> xclipboard("text")
ERROR: Requested clipboard target(s) not found.
in xclipboard at /home/kmsquire/.julia/v0.3/XClipboard/src/XClipboard.jl:37
in xclipboard at /home/kmsquire/.julia/v0.3/XClipboard/src/XClipboard.jl:45Misc
Binary data (such as images) can be received from the clipboard. However, decoding is currently left up to the individual.
Images, in particular, seem to (almost?) always be available as
image/bmp; however, there is currently nobmpdecoder in Julia.
