== A little habit: _cat >/dev/null_

If you were to haunt me, every so often you would see me open up a
[[new terminal window ../unix/PersistentVsDisposableUsage]], run
'_cat >/dev/null_', and paste or type something there.

What I am doing with this peculiar behavior is simple: I'm arranging
for a slightly more persistent text storage than [[my X selection
../unix/XSelectionTwitch]]. I park any number of things depending
on what I'm doing; snippets of text from [[fishing back in editor
undo ../programming/UndoOperations]], commands that I'm temporarily
re-running, and so on.

There's nothing particularly special about _cat_ in a terminal window
for this. There's any number of other programs and ways that I could do
this; it's just that this way is the fastest and most convenient in my
environment. Your environment is probably different, especially if you
keep an editor going all of the time (if I always had Emacs running, I'd
probably just paste things into a scratch Emacs buffer).

(In theory _xclipboard_ should be ideal for this. In practice it
sadly doesn't work out, partly because its version of cut & paste is
significantly worse than that of terminal programs.)

Note that in some ways using a terminal window is a bad idea. I
always have to make sure that any tabs are unimportant, because
they're probably going to turn into spaces by the time I paste
the text back into its eventual destination.

(I would really like an X terminal program that was smart enough
to preserve tabs, but I haven't run into one yet.)