xpaste - paste text into X windows that don't work with selections

SYNOPSIS

xpaste <<EOF
This text will be pasted into a window of your choosing.
EOF

DESCRIPTION

Some applications refuse to work with any of the three selection buffers that X/X11/Xorg has: the middle-mouse selection, secondary selection and the CTRL-(SHIFT-)V clipboard selection.

If you have to insert long or difficult to type text (generated passwords), not being able to paste can be troublesome.

xpaste will read the text to paste from standard input, keep it in memory and wait for you to press ENTER. When you do, it pastes the held text into the newly focused window.

See this before/after example where the username is pasted into the SuperMicro ipmiview Java application that doesn't accept "paste" input through the middle-mouse or CTRL-V:

The pasting of text happens through "faked" keypress events. And as you can see from the example, it works.

NOTE: xpaste now works with Wayland as well: it uses /dev/uinput to attach a virtual keyboard.

COPYRIGHT

Copyright (C) 2016,2018,2020,2022 Walter Doekes, OSSO B.V.

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

SEE ALSO

xsel(1), crikey(1)