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Clipboard merging stickiness and strange behaviour


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While I love the Clipboard Merging feature in theory, it's very unpredictable in practice.

 

I'm using Alfred v2.2.243 Powerpack.

 

I found that I can use the following ways to do fast merge:

  • Select and item and hit Cmd + C-C
  • Select multiple items and then hit Cmd + C-C (appends all items)

From the description given merging should only be possible from the clipboard window, but I'm doing this inside iTerm2.

 

The problem I have is that resetting of the merge buffer is not working reproducible.

 

This works most of the time:

  • Select text
  • Copy an item with Cmd + C
  • Select different text
  • Hit Cmd+C-C
  • Paste text with Cmd+V
  • Repeat

But every few time I do this, it doesn't start merging with an empty buffer, after I use Cmd+C and instead the content copied with Cmd+C is appended to the buffer.

 

The expected behavior is that using Cmd+C always starts with a new merge buffer and Cmd+C-C appends to it.

 

Alternatively it would also be fine if Cmd+V cleared the merge buffer, but that should probably be a configurable flag, as some people might want to paste the merged buffer multiple times.

Edited by felixbuenemann
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I disabled the autocopy on selection in iTerm2, but there is still strange behavior where the merge buffer doesn't reset on Cmd+C:

  • Copy a selected text A with Cmd+C
  • Append text B with Cmd+C-C
  • Paste with Cmd+V: "A B"
  • Copy text C with Cmd+C
  • Paste with Cmd+V: "C"
  • Copy text D with Cmd+C-C
  • Paste with Cmd+V: "A B D" (sometimes)

Expected: "C D"

 

This is not always reproducible. But sometimes Alfred keeps appending to an older merge buffer instead of starting a new buffer on Cmd+C.

 

I've not yet found the exact order in which to do copy and paste to get the stuck merge buffer problem, but it happened to me many times.

Edited by felixbuenemann
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I've not yet found the exact order in which to do copy and paste to get the stuck merge buffer problem, but it happened to me many times.

 

Alfred has a very simple mechanism to perform clipboard merging, he simply looks for duplicate subsequent entries in the clipboard with an incremented clipboard count. Whenever this fails, it is usually down to an external program interfering with the clipboard. One example of this is PopClip which temporarily uses the clipboard to perform certain tasks and this causes duplicate subsequent entries in the clipboard as if a user had performed it, causing a merge. There are other apps which can do the same... do you have any memory resident apps which could be doing something like this?

 

[moving to help sub-forum to see if anybody else can offer some ideas]

 

Cheers,

Andrew

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  • 9 years later...

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