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Killing Klipper

Note: This no longer seems to rear its ugly head in recent versions. (RHEL 5.x and later.) Perhaps I was not the only person annoyed with this behavior. I've left this information intact for historical purposes.

Klipper is that annoying clipboard tool that, ever time you click on a URL, will bring up a dialog asking which asks you what browser you want to run it in. Which means that you cannot cut and paste URLs. (Or if you can, it is certainly nonintuitive.)

Another web page on the Internet mentioned that you can turn this off globally by renaming the autostart klipper.desktop file (found, on RH systems, in /usr/share/autostart). However, when I did this I found that something in KDE would lock up the machine when KDE first starts up. This is definitely rude behavior, and not something that a non-privaleged user should be able to do (*grumble*). This was true even if the klipper.desktop file was moved to another directory. (Afterthought: Was this because I had klipper-related config files left over in my $HOME/.kde directory hierarchy? I don't know.)

Therefore, the mechanism that I used to disable this mis-feature was to edit $HOME/.kde/share/config/klipperrc and set the following line thus:

    URLGrabberEnabled=false

You can also disable it globally by setting the same value in the /usr/share/config/klipperrc file. Note, though, that this won't affect users who already have an overriding value in their personal klipperrc file.