kill-ring-save vs. clipboard-kill-ring-save

Question

In the menu-bar of Emacs-23 under [Edit] there is Cut, Copy, Paste which are all explicit clipboard related commands ; the traditional C-w, M-w, C-y are no longer offered, and these no longer have an effect relevant to X.

What is the cleanest way to make the traditional commands clipboard-aware? It seems there must be some more systematic way than just redefining everything. C-h C-n did not help me.

Is it intended to hide the traditional command from users?

Edit: Or at least: a command to "synchronize" with the clipboard.

Answer 1

X has two "clipboards": the primary selection, and the clipboard. Emacs 23 uses the primary selection by default, but it seems you want the clipboard. You can enable this with the following in your .emacs:

(setq x-select-enable-clipboard t)

This setting changed in Emacs 24 to use the clipboard by default. See also: http://emacswiki.org/emacs/CopyAndPaste