Copy to clipboard not working on Ubuntu

[alexanderkjall]

Hi

On my ubuntu machine the cli_clipboard::set_contents function doesn't copy anything to the copy buffer.

I'm running Ubuntu 22.10 with xfce as my window manager.

This small program reproduces the problem:

use std::{thread, time};
use cli_clipboard;

fn main() {
   let the_string = "Hello, world!";
   cli_clipboard::set_contents(the_string.to_owned()).unwrap();

   let ten_millis = time::Duration::from_millis(100000);
   thread::sleep(ten_millis);
}

A similar program using the clipboard crate doesn't show the same problem:

use std::{thread, time};
use clipboard::ClipboardProvider;
use clipboard::ClipboardContext;

fn main() {
    let mut ctx: ClipboardContext = ClipboardProvider::new().unwrap();

    let the_string = "Hello, world!";

    ctx.set_contents(the_string.to_owned()).unwrap();

    let ten_millis = time::Duration::from_millis(100000);

    thread::sleep(ten_millis);
}

[alexanderkjall]

I did a bisect, and the error was introduced by this commit: 15e39bf

And I guess that it's the upgrade of the x11-clipboard crate that have caused this:

- x11-clipboard = "0.3"
+ x11-clipboard = "0.5.1"

I guess that I have to bisect the x11-clipboard crate now T_T

[alexanderkjall]

Did a bisect and opened a bug in x11-clipboard: quininer/x11-clipboard#32

[allie-wake-up]

For both this and #17 the issue seems to lie with x11-clipboard. Using it directly does not resolve the problem. I looked into it quite a bit tonight and it seems like the options are downgrade x11-clipboard to 0.6.1, wait for or make a fix to x11-clipboard, find a different x11 clipboard dependency (which it doesn't seem like there is), or handle the x11 clipboard directly with x11rb (possible but looks like a greater undertaking than I currently have time for).

My immediate suggestion would be to use cli-clipboard v0.3.0 which from what I can tell works correctly (it uses x11-clipboard 0.6.1) or switching to https://github.com/1Password/arboard. It seems to work on X11 correctly and is the only cross-platform clipboard library I could find that did not rely on x11-clipboard. I did not test it on windows, macOS, or wayland but it seems to be very actively maintained so is likely your current best bet.