You must log in or register to comment.
FACT.
Does anyone here know why it’s unreliable?
It wasn’t always like this.
I swear every version of Windows between 3.11 and XP was 100% reliable. Then it just started… slipping.
What’s weird is that it often works on the second try.
Because your company makes you use Azure Virtual Desktop to connect to a VM and AVD’s clipboard handling is as unreliable as anything else from Microsoft?
That’s a sensible theory for when this happens at work (it’s Citrix in my case).
I’d swear it happens at home on Windows 10 as well, though. Maybe I am pressing it wrong sometimes. Either way, the meme is spot on for me.
I have unconfirmed theories.
- My C and V key are literally the most worn keys on my keyboard. The letters are completely worn off, they’re by far my most used keys. That amount of use probably makes the contacts degrade and less reliable.
- Windows 10 (I think?) introduced a “fancy clipboard” with history and multi paste and generally made it an “app”. In my experience the fancier it is the more failure points, since it’s no longer just a simple OS memory buffer, it has its own application logic.
- Since it’s a global hotkey, the OS has to:
- Handle the interrupt
- Query the currently active window / application for a “copy” output of the currently highlighted context
- Wait for a response
- Place that response into a buffer of some sort
- In a highly volatile asynchronous UI where the user can alt tab at any time, I imagine often what happens is that you just didn’t wait long enough for the data to actually copy. Pressing CTRL+C would be equivalent in reliability as waiting 2 seconds, but it’s more fun to press the button a bunch
Thanks, that’s interesting - I hadn’t thought about the window messages responding to update the all clipboard
It’s odd to me that the paste is almost never the previous clipboard value - it’s basically always null
Handle the interrupt
For better or worse, usb devices need to be polled by the computer all the time, instead of delivering interrupts at the moment of input events. I’m baffled by this fact, but am not versed in hardware design well enough to weigh pros and cons. I assume that the polling is handled by the usb controller, though.
Query the currently active window / application for a “copy” output of the currently highlighted context
Place that response into a buffer of some sort
To my vague knowledge, the various GUIs all request content from the owner of the selection at the moment of pasting, i.e. ctrl-v — presumably both to avoid storing large swathes of pictures and such, and to allow conversion to the target format on the fly. However, iirc some environments require defining the available formats when content is copied, so idk how this meshes with that. I’m not a desktop programmer, so not entirely sure. Perhaps it’s just to simplify copying for the programmer of the source app, instead of exposing the whole innards.
In a highly volatile asynchronous UI where the user can alt tab at any time, I imagine often what happens is that you just didn’t wait long enough for the data to actually copy.
Properly, any input event would be delivered to the app (or rather the UI element) that was active at the time of the event — and presumably the OS UI runs at a higher priority for that. However, in practice it seems to be a toss-up as to whether it really works like this.
In my case it’s mostly that browsers and as such also electron Apps unfocus textboxes when the window is unfocused for seemingly no reason, sometimes without giving visual indication meaning that I need to reselect it to copy it.
Because copy and paste started bring over formatting.
If you do control shift V, it removes it and is much more reliable.
No that’s not what I mean (plus it doesn’t work most of the time, either). It’s the copying that often fails for me, which I only notice when I paste and realize “wait a minute, these are the previous contents of the clipboard.”
Windows.
This is a huge problem in windows now and it never used to be.
Everything Microsoft does seems to degrade that shit OS daily.
it pisses me off so much. literally every month some new feature/bug is added to critical software that we use and which results in clearly quantifiable wasted time, money, and stress
the ctrl+c issue alone has cost the company a few thousand dollars in the past year from the few cases I can think of off the top of my head. there’s a bit of software that we use where we need to enter the information that exists in one field into another field. obviously copy paste is the way to do this, it’s simple and it should work, right? except the program is built on Access and has its own problems on top of Windows fucking everything up. so what happens is people paste the previous copy into the new field instead of the newly-attemped copy. and that results in people spending hundreds of dollars to order the wrong part. bc the fucking software is garbage to interact with.
I’ll never understand why successful companies can’t just keep printing money, but give in to the insatiable desire to enshittify.
Mouse highlight -> middle mouse click
Where’s CTRL + INSERT, SHIFT + INSERT
And shift + del for cut, if I remember correctly.
Watch out this person has computers that still have insert keys!
Don’t they all? Maybe not tkl boards, but maybe via fiction key like on some laptops?
Laptops mostly that keep having keys being removed.
And here is someone who has absolutely at some point in history modified the source code to GORILLAS.BAS.
I haven’t thought about chucking explosive bananas in years.
Edit: And now I’m remembering “Nibbles”!
Hey! It doesn’t mean we’re that ol…fuck.
Hell yeah! That takes me back!
On linux
kdeyou can highlight & middle clickEdit: ive only ever used kde seriously so didn’t realise this was an x/ wayland thing.
Pretty sure that’s an X (and I guess now Wayland) thing, not a KDE thing. I could be wrong, but I think you could sit down at a VAX from the '80s and expect it to work.
Thanks for the correction!
That was part of X right? Not jusy KDE. And a lot of wayland stuff also has it.
i have this in hyprland which is wayland 👍
Probably my most hated feature that I couldn’t turn off. Every time I expected middle click to start scrolling in VSCode or a word document or any app really, it would paste my clipboard instead, and I would die a little inside
It’s a UX issue. Ctrl+c has no feedback to the user.
It’s also just a Windows issue because it doesn’t recognize that I pressed control c sometimes
It is absolutely a windows 11 clipboard issue, which fails silently ALL OF THE TIME.
Don’t you mean ctrl + shift + c if in terminal and ctrl+c elsewhere
Selecting text to automatically copy it, and then pasting it with the middle mouse button is clearly the superior method.
They aren’t prepared for the ancient texts
Vim has entered the chat
vwypBurn the witch!!!
You press ctrl+c 20 times. I press ctrl +x then ctrl +v once. We are not the same
And then ctrl-z a bunch of times because fuckfuckfuck
nvim packs the most essential features 😍
I don’t get it.
Gotta make sure that things get copied.
Ctrl + X a function
Select some loose whitespace, backspace
Ctrl + V: Gives back the whitespace and that’s all
What the everloving fk, IDE
Ctrl + x -> Ctrl + v -> Ctrl + v
I don’t know what I’m doing wrong, but I seriously sometimes don’t have the “COPY” part execute sometimes … I’ve tried to do only one copy a few times and I’m like “wait, why didn’t it copy”?
it’s not just you, it’s because Windows is fucking shit and just doesn’t do it sometimes
