Get the PRIMARY using Java

[ingolfured]

Hey guys, my first thread here,

As some of you know the X11 has something called PRIMARY, SECONDARY and the CLIPBOARD. It's easy to access the clipboard, for instance through java.awt.datatransfer.Clipboard, but do you guys know any way to get the current PRIMARY by some Java API?

[11jmb]

Welcome

I'm not sure if you're looking for a more system-level solution, but if you are looking to read/copy primary selections from a single program, JTextComponent has a getSelectedText() method.

[ingolfured]

Thanks for the reply. I thought maybe there would be an easy way (method or something) to get to the PRIMARY. What I did (which is an ugly solution) was I changed the program autocutsel to make it write to a .txt file. Then I used java to read back from that file.

If someone has a better solution, I would be delight.

[11jmb]

You could try using JNI to access the native xlib library.

[ingolfured]

Thanks ! Eventually, that became my solution.