The strange case of some applications not being able to copy/paste on the Mac OS X clipboard
Posted by jpluimers on 2017/07/19
I’ve not tracked down the cause yet, but these seem to be related:
- The Mac OS X build of Atom IO
- WinBox v 3.4 WineBottle version from Winbox for Mac in an embedded Wine environment – Joshaven.com
- pbcopy / pbpaste that allow command-line copy/pasting
- none of these being able to copy/paste any more and return error level 1 like terminal – pbcopy exits code 1, no error message – Ask Different but not even running tmux or screen which means this solution does not apply: ChrisJohnsen/tmux-MacOSX-pasteboard: Notes and workarounds for accessing the Mac OS X pasteboard in tmux sessions.
- I didn’t have Mouse Keys turned on
- Other applications (Chrome, FireFox, TextEdit, Finder, etc) still being able to copy/paste between each other
I’ve “fixed” 4. by doing this as recommended at osx – Copy and Cut sometimes don’t work – Ask Different:
launchctl list | grep com.apple.pboard
If the pboard daemon is running, then stop and start it. If it’s not running, start it:
launchctl stop com.apple.pboard launchctl start com.apple.pboard
Now 4. works again if I restart each application, 6. still works, but these applications still cannot copy/paste to 1. 2. and 3.
What does work is a full reboot, but that takes a while (especially Chrome re-loading lots of Windows: I need to get more organised here).
It might be that I need to restart each application in 6.
Grrr…..
–jeroen
ruurd said
Hmmm. Checked Atom but IWFM
ruurd said
As for Atom yes well. Nodejs crap right? I think there are more macOS applications that can’t do that because they use that technology…
ruurd said
Reboot? Sometimes that helps. I checked pbcopy/paste and IWFM…
jpluimers said
reboot did the trick, but had to reload like 100 chrome tabs taking about 30 minutes.