== A new piece of my environment: clearing the X selection

I've [[mentioned before ../unix/XSelectionTwitch]] that one of my
little twitches is keeping my X selection empty so that I don't have
any accidents with accidental pastes. For a long time I'd often do this
by starting a new xterm, selecting a space, and then closing the xterm
again. I was recently fiddling with my FVWM menus when it occurred to
me that this was a crazy way of clearing the X selection and I should
be able to do better.

So now I have a little script that clears the X selection and along with
it a menu item that is called simply 'Clear' to run the script. Instead
of going through a whole rigmarole with xterms I can just fidget with
this by popping up the relevant menu and selecting it. I can't say that
this exactly saves me time (this is a reflexive twitch), but it does
make the whole thing less distracting because it's over faster and it
makes me feel better about it. In retrospect I should have done this
years ago.

(It also makes me happier. For all that I didn't think of the whole old
rigmarole as any particular burden, I think it actually was and I just
didn't notice it. There is probably a lesson to be learned here about
other aspects of my environment but the problem is that these things
are 'fish in water' issues; I'm probably not going to notice them until
after I stumble into a fix.)

The script itself is:
.pn prewrap on
>  #!/bin/sh
>  xsel -c
>  xcb -s 0 </dev/null

(This should probably also have '_xsel -c -b_' to clear the clipboard
selection too. So far I haven't needed that; programs like xterm ignore
the clipboard if the primary selection and the cut buffer are empty.)

_xsel_ is probably packaged for your Linux distribution.  I had to
compile [[xcb http://oldhome.schmorp.de/marc/xcb.html]] from source,
but it's not exactly a big program.

(You need two programs because X has two separate selection
systems. [[It's a long story XCutAndPasteHistory]].)