edit.selected_text() in Emacs on Linux produces Emacs error: "Selection owner couldn't convert: MULTIPLE"

[rntz]

With this edit.selected_text() implementation:

@ctx.action_class("edit")
class EditActions:
    def selected_text() -> str:
        with clip.capture() as s:
            actions.edit.copy()
        try:
            return s.text()
        except clip.NoChange:
            return ""

And with edit.copy() in emacs implemented as key("alt-w") (the keybinding for copying), running edit.selected_text() yields an empty string and produces an emacs error message, Selection owner couldn't convert: MULTIPLE. I'm not sure what the root cause here is. This used to work just fine, not sure when it broke, probably in the last month or two? My guess is something is going wrong with MIME types?

Ubuntu 21.10, GNU Emacs 27.1, Talon v0.2.0-347-gab2a

[rntz]

This seems to be fixed as of Talon v0.2.0-352.

[rntz]

This error message still occurs and has been occurring for a while. However, most (all?) of the time edit.selected_text() nonetheless correctly produces the actual selected text.

However, this error seems to be causing occasional failures of context-sensitive dictation. I'm not sure why, since the behavior on the Talon side appears to be correct? But if I replace selected_text with an implementation that shells out to xsel instead of calling clip.get_text or clip.capture the error message goes away and context-sensitive dictation seems to work consistently. I need to debug further.

For now I've worked around this by changing my selected_text implementation. I'd be interested if anybody knows what might be causing the error message.

[lunixbochs]

Does adding a small sleep after actions.edit.copy() improve it?

[rntz]

I added a 150ms sleep. The emacs error message still occurs. I'll try it out for a while to see whether it improves the context-sensitive dictation flakiness.

[lunixbochs]

can you retest on latest talon-rust?

(I'm going to preemptively close this though, because I know we don't query the MULTIPLE target anymore)