Global hook to yank operations with xclip hangs xclip and kakoune

[hacktivista]

Steps

Use the following hook in your kakrc

hook global NormalKey y|d|c %{ nop %sh{
  printf %s "$kak_main_reg_dquote" | xclip -i -selection clipboard
}}

Outcome

When you yank something, kakoune displays the message waiting for shell command to finish, but command "never finishes", indeed if you ps you can see that xclip is running. No *debug* information is provided.

Expected

It should copy the contents into X clipboard "immediately"

I think it probably has more to do with xclip than with kakoune, but knowing why this happens would be of great help (or in the worst case, say that it will not work in wiki).

[lenormf]

Have you tried running xclip with the -verbose flag, see what it's doing?

You could also add set +x do your shell scope, and check the *debug* buffer, and run the exact same command from a shell, to see if you can reproduce the issue.

What version of xclip are you using?

[maximbaz]

That's know issue of xclip, see here for example: asweigart/pyperclip#116 (comment)

See if workarounds like -f or >/dev/null help, or just use xsel.

[hacktivista]

@maximbaz you're right, I didn't notice that it was actually copying contents to clipboard until I stop the process. It's curious that the same does not happen with xsel, which works in a similar fashion.

[mawww]

I dont think there is anything that we can fix in Kakoune itself for that, closing.

[aeosynth]

for reference, xclip issues:

astrand/xclip#34
astrand/xclip#20

[ljrk0]

Closing stdout & stderr seems to do the trick (also updated the Wiki):

xclip -in -selection clipboard >&- 2>&-