Clipboard inconsistent between applications

I'm running OSX 10.10 and I have issues when trying to copy between applications. I find that I seem to have at least 2 clipboards. One for

Adium
Automator
Calculator
Calendar
Contacts
Cyberduck
Dashboard
Dictionary
Google Chrome
TextMate
PyCharm
Dropbox
ClipMenu
pbcopy/pbpaste
Safari
Sonos

Another for:

iTerm2
Sticky Notes
Slack
Spotlight
Finder (Edit -> show clipboard)

I'm not sure which is the system clipboard, and it's incredibly annoying not to be able to copy between applications effectively. Has anyone experienced this before? What can I do about it?

EDIT: I had had chrome in the wrong category. I moved it.

EDIT 2: I started going through my applications alphabetically. I've added a bunch more to the top category.

Jakob Weisblat

Posted 2015-06-10T14:57:55.860

Reputation: 926

It's not a bug, it's a feature, MacOS doesn't have double clipboard =) Apart from joke, are you sure you have no malware? Some bad malware can hijack/change clipboard content consistently and are known to cause such issues. – Jet – 2015-06-16T19:50:51.877

can you give a more detailed step by step example of copying between Dropbox and Sticky Notes. This is needed, because the apps pbcopy/pbpaste and Safari are OSX standard, same as Sticky Notes, which makes it impossible to re-produce your answered behaviour unless we know what you did exactly. – Marco M. von Hagen – 2015-06-17T10:49:55.207

I take a screenshot, at which point Dropbox stores it and copies a dropbox link to my clipboard. I then paste in stickies and paste the thing that I copied in stickies before dropbox affected my keyboard. If I paste in Chrome or Safari (command+V), then it pastes the dropbox link. If I paste in iTerm or Slack (command + V), it pastes what I copied in stickies. – Jakob Weisblat – 2015-06-17T13:35:23.940

Answers

Have you tried removing ClipMenu? It looks like the project has not been updated to support Yosemite: https://github.com/naotaka/ClipMenu/issues/8#issuecomment-109988640

Also, you can see which group of applications is using the Mac Clipboard with Finder -> Edit -> Show Clipboard.

Final Solution: launchctl list | grep com.apple.pboard to check the existence of the pboard daemon (This should spit it out). Then:

launchctl stop com.apple.pboard
launchctl start com.apple.pboard

Then kill an application on the bad list, relaunch it, and see if it starts working on the good list.

CodingPenguins

Posted 2015-06-10T14:57:55.860

Reputation: 369

I added clipMenu to try to deal with this problem. :-\ – Jakob Weisblat – 2015-06-18T12:55:56.907

So what happens when you remove ClipMenu? What about Finder -> Edit -> Show Clipboard? – CodingPenguins – 2015-06-18T12:57:29.607

I removed clipmenu and the problem persists. I added finder to one of the categories above. – Jakob Weisblat – 2015-06-18T13:29:58.883

Execute the following command from terminal:

cat /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.pboard.plist | pbcopy

and paste the results here. – CodingPenguins – 2015-06-18T13:38:58.720

See https://gist.github.com/jake223/e11725a39c20b19dd4a1#file-gistfile1-txt - (I had to copy only the command and do \pbpaste` | pbcopy`, :p)

– Jakob Weisblat – 2015-06-18T13:41:00.573

launchctl list | grep com.apple.pboard to check the existence of the pboard daemon (This should spit it out).

Then try: launchctl stop com.apple.pboard and then launchctl start com.apple.pboard

Then kill an application on the bad list, relaunch it, and see if it starts working on the good list. – CodingPenguins – 2015-06-18T13:48:13.863

If you edit your answer to be your most recent comment and add that I should also restart an application on the good list to get it onto the new clipboard, I'll accept and upvote your answer (and bounty it if this works for a few days) – Jakob Weisblat – 2015-06-18T14:35:26.313

Updated my original post. – CodingPenguins – 2015-06-18T16:19:05.320

For anyone struggling with this who does not find himself with a duplicate apple board (using the list command). This also happens for me after a random amount of time (usually after a couple of days) on High Sierra. A full reboot always restores the intended functionality for me. It seems as if putting the device to hibernate often enough will at some point break your clipboard management. I haven't digged into that further but I hope it helps!

Fohlen

Posted 2015-06-10T14:57:55.860

Reputation: 1