Keyboards and Mice (was Model M, NEC ProSpeed)

Sean Conner spc at conman.org
Wed Jun 1 18:41:51 CDT 2016


It was thus said that the Great Liam Proven once stated:
> On 1 June 2016 at 17:48, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote:
> > I'm keyboard-oriented--Ctrl-V, where I've copied using Ctrl-X or
> > Control-C .
> 
> The neat thing about middle-click-to-paste-selection is that it's *as
> well as* the clipboard C&P.
> 
> So you can, for instance, highlight a URL, hit Ctrl-C to copy,
> highlight the page title, switch windows, middle-click to paste the
> title, then Ctrl-V to paste the URL too.
> 
> *All in a single operation.*
> 
> It's /very/ handy and worth learning if only for that reason alone.

  An interesting thing about Firefox on Linux [1] is that once you select
the text of a webpage, you have some interesting options:

	TIMESTAMP
	TARGETS
	MULTIPLE
	text/html
	text/_moz_htmlcontext
	text/_moz_htmlinfo
	UTF8_STRING
	COMPOUND_TEXT
	TEXT
	STRING
	text/x-moz-url

  Those are the selection types available via X Windows [2].  "text/html"
returns the HTML of the selected portion of the page.  "text/x-moz-url" will
return the URL of the page.  "UTF8_STRING" will return the selected text as
UTF-8 encoded data.  

  Because of this, I wrote a command line program to query the current
selection (assumed to be a webpage) and obtain not only the selected
portion, but the URL and from there, request the page to extract the title
element [3].  All in a single command.

  -spc (The X Selection method is quite flexible)

[1]	Or used to be; I haven't done this since I switched to using Mac
	OS-X for web browsing.

[2]	I won't go into depth of how this works right now---just be aware
	that you can chose what type of data to obtain from the selection
	owner.

[3]	A typical operation when blogging about a web page.



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