This is a partial translation of Ed Rosten's [x_clipboard] (https://github.com/edrosten/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.
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.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:45-
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.