What is the differene between the clipboard and the primary clipboard?

[savente93]

The documentation states:

:clipboard-yank | Yank main selection into system clipboard.
...
:primary-clipboard-yank | Yank main selection into system primary clipboard.

It is really unclear to me what the difference is between these two, as both seem to pase the system's clipboard? Can anyone explain to me what the primary clipboard (or the non-primary for that matter) is?

[kirawi]

IIRC, primary clipboard is what is generally used for copy-paste operations. The non-primary keyboard can be e.g. the terminal middle-click clipboard. You can see

helix/helix-view/src/clipboard.rs

Line 100 in 88bc52a

pub fn get_clipboard_provider() -> Box<dyn ClipboardProvider> {

[dead10ck]

This is a Linux thing. See

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/139191/whats-the-difference-between-primary-selection-and-clipboard-buffer