Friday, July 27, 2007

So, This is Weird (aka, TextMate doesn’t want to play nice with the other kids)

Warning… Geek stuff ahead. Nothing funny here. Regular goofiness will return Monday, unless I think of something funny this afternoon, in which case, I’ll shovel it right out to the IntarWebs. (Update! Figured out the problem, see below.)

Anyone else who uses the normally delightful TextMate, ever have this problem?

Copy and Paste into or out of TextMate, just stops working.

See the pics below.

In this one I’ve copied some text to the clipboard:

Now we go to Mail.app (or any other app for that matter)

Copy some different text:

Go back to TextMate. Paste. Should be the copy I snagged from within Mail, right? No, not so much. Same text I had earlier in TextMate:

But what happens if we copy some text from TextMate and try to pull it into Mail? (You’ll just have to trust me that I re-copied my snippet of “Hello there!” text.

Couple of caveats:

I use iClip, which kind of mucks around with the normal clipboard process, allowing you to have multiple clipboards. BUT! It wasn’t running when I took the screen grabs. And, I’ve used iClip without too much fuss before. And! It’s like everything works grandly for a while, but then things stop working. A machine restart fixes everything, but that’s annoying and a rather inelegant solution. And! I also use TextExpander, which seems to do some copy/past wizardry to do it’s “auto-complete and then put the cursor in a different spot” mojo. But again, after a restart, everything works perfectly, and at some point in the day, copy and paste in TextMate stops working. Doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. And I know TM does its own copy/paste “stuff” with its “Paste from History” geekery. Maybe all three of those things get together in a room and start fighting and TM decides it doesn’t want to play anymore. But it still doesn’t explain why it sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t.

And here is my System Info:

Anyone have any ideas? It’s driving me a little batty. TextMate is one of favorite tools and I’m all sad inside when I can’t use it.


UPDATE:
Seems it’s a bug in the system’s pasteboard server. Details here and here.

Basically, quit everything except the Terminal. Then fire off the following commands in the Terminal:

killall pbs

followed by

nohup /System/Library/CoreServices/pbs &

The first command nukes the pasteboard server process and the second one re-starts it. I recommend quitting the Terminal and also re-launching the Finder. You do that by bringing up the “Force Quit” applications box (Cmd + Option + Escape), highlighting the “Finder” and them smacking the “Relaunch” button. See below:

Whew! Now I can get on with my life.

1. I’ve had this same problem. Copying from Textmate doesn’t put the text in the clipboard.

   I am also using another app that futzes with the clipboard, but in my case it’s Quicksilver, with the Clipboard History plugin. Whenever Textmate starts showing this problem, QS clipboard history stops working as well.

   Posted by Mike H  on  08/17/07  at  07:59 AM

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