system-wide (summary)

There's also a mechanism called "cut buffers", however, those are defunct and no longer used.

system-wide

• [Wikipedia] X Window selection
  [Wikipedia] Clipboard#X Window System
• X Selections, Cut Buffers, and Kill Rings., by JWZ
  "X10 had these things called 'Cut Buffers' ... They are obsolete; don't use them. Some applications (like xterm) still have legacy support for them, but ignore that.
• The X Selection Mechanism [pdf] — some of the more technical details
• utilities that work with selections generically
  • xsel(1) man page
    "The X server maintains three selections, called PRIMARY, SECONDARY and CLIPBOARD."
  • xsel vs xclip
  • example use of xclip
  • autocutsel — synchronizes the cutbuffer ⇔ PRIMARY selection

specific applications

• vim
  • read *x11-selection*:
    • The "*" buffer is the PRIMARY selection (ie. the one that's expected to represent the current visual selection)
    • The "+" buffer is the CLIPBOARD selection (ie. the one that's used for traditional clipboard semantics)
• OpenOffice

  Function	Clipboard	Selection clipboard
  Copy content	Edit > Copy, Control+C	Select text, table, or object.
  Paste content	Edit > Paste, Control+V pastes at the cursor position.	Clicking the middle mouse button pastes at the mouse pointer position.
  Pasting into another document	No effect on the clipboard contents.	The last marked selection is the content of the selection clipboard.