Clipboard history and Parallels

[M4tt]

Hi!

 

I'm running the latest Parallels (9.0.23062) and Alfred Versions (2.0.9) on 10.8 with Parallels Win-Mac clipboard sync enabled.

I'm using alfred since the early beta days and I'm really happy with it, except when it comes to the clipboard history and Parallels. I'm forced to use Notepad++ and Word 2010 a lot, so the following bug is really annoying and makes alfreds clipboard history almost unusable for my day to day work.

 

Alfred doesn't correctly remember Parallels clipboard items, when I copy multiple items (e.g. strings) in Windows.

When viewing the clipboard history, only the last item copied in Windows is available. If I copy multiple things, I have to open the clipboard history after every copied item so alfred remembers all items.

 

In addition, Alfred always displays wrong icons beside parallels clipboard items. Alfred displays either the Alfred hat logo or the icon of a random Mac application (wrong icons don't bother me, but maybe it helps tracking down the issue as it seems to me that the problem is related to Alfred not being able to tell from which application clipboard items added by Parallels come from)

 

This bug is present regardless of the guest Windows version, I've tried XP and 8, and regardless of the Windows application used. It also didn't work with older Alfred/Parallels versions.

 

Please fix this!

Edited October 13, 2013 by M4tt

[Andrew]

Hi!

 

I'm running the latest Parallels (9.0.23062) and Alfred Versions (2.0.9) on 10.8 with Parallels Win-Mac clipboard sync enabled.

I'm using alfred since the early beta days and I'm really happy with it, except when it comes to the clipboard history and Parallels. I'm forced to use Notepad++ and Word 2010 a lot, so the following bug is really annoying and makes alfreds clipboard history almost unusable for my day to day work.

 

Alfred doesn't correctly remember Parallels clipboard items, when I copy multiple items (e.g. strings) in Windows.

When viewing the clipboard history, only the last item copied in Windows is available. If I copy multiple things, I have to open the clipboard history after every copied item so alfred remembers all items.

 

In addition, Alfred always displays wrong icons beside parallels clipboard items. Alfred displays either the Alfred hat logo or the icon of a random Mac application (wrong icons don't bother me, but maybe it helps tracking down the issue as it seems to me that the problem is related to Alfred not being able to tell from which application clipboard items added by Parallels come from)

 

This bug is present regardless of the guest Windows version, I've tried XP and 8, and regardless of the Windows application used. It also didn't work with older Alfred/Parallels versions.

 

Please fix this!

 

Alfred is agnostic to the underlying applications and simply updates his history when there is a new item present in OS X's clipboard.

 

What I think is happening is that the Parallels clipboard sync only happens when there is a request made on the clipboard data itself... It may be doing this to prevent bloating, as shifting large amounts of clipboard data around the whole time is quite CPU/Mem intensive. As a side effect of this, the OS X clipboard isn't updated until the contents are read, which means the clipboard change counter isn't updated in OS X, so Alfred doesn't know that there is new data in the clipboard. This would also explain why the icon is wrong as the data is synced at some point later when the original app isn't selected.

 

There really isn't anything I can do to fix this other than getting Alfred to physically read the entire clipboard contents on a set time interval rather than just [very light weight] watching the OS X clipboard data increment counter. Doing this would turn Alfred's clipboard history into a CPU and memory hog, the thing I think Parallels is trying to avoid.

 

I'm moving this to noted for now, but as this is specific to Parallels and the way it syncs the clipboard, I don't think you'll see this working in Alfred any time soon unless Parallels changes the way the sync works. It might be worth starting a dialog with Parallels to find out if there is anything you can do to force it to always sync clipboard data back to OS X's clipboard.

 

Cheers,

Andrew