awt does not have any classes or methods for dealing with the windowing system's clipboard. All three windowing systems (X/Motif, Windows, and MacOS) have a concept of a clipboard, and the operation of this clipboard is almost identical in all three systems. Each has an Edit menu with Copy, Cut, and Paste commands; these commands have keyboard equivalents, and alternate methods of use; each implements these commands for text areas in an application-independent way; and each allows programmers to use the clipboard for application-specific data in addition to text.

awt allows clipboard access to the extent that the underlying implementations of its objects support clipboard access. For example, the motif versions of TextArea and TextComponent allow the standard left-drag copy and middle-click paste. However, it is not possible to access the clipboard directly. This is a major problem with awt.

Direct clipboard access is desirable at least in the following cases: when the programmer is trying to implement a text area Component that has more functionality than TextArea; when the programmer wishes to provide an Edit menu in one of his or her windows; and when the programmer wishes to use the more advanced capabilities of the clipboard to store graphics, documents, or other more advanced objects.