electron: Clipboard not working in some OSX environments

Context

I’m building an app on atom-shell and a portion of atom. Copy/paste does not work for me, but it does for my other team members running identical code, identical versions of atom-shell and on OSX.

Example

c = require("clipboard")
c.writeText("text")
c.readText()
# undefined

This example sets the clipboard text and reads it back correctly if executed in atom on my machine, but shows the behaviour above in our atom-shell based app. It neither sets the clipboard, nor can it read it.

Environment

Atom-shell 0.19.4
OSX 10.9.5

Probably unrelated, but also installed systemwide:

Atom 0.152.0
NPM 2.1.6
Node 0.10.33

About this issue

Original URL
State: closed
Created 10 years ago
Comments: 16 (6 by maintainers)

Most upvoted comments

Were you using any custom shell like screen or tmux in the terminal?

zcbenz on Jan 2, 2015

OS X’s clipboard API requires the process to run in a UI session, which might not be true if you are using tmux, you can also try if pbcopy/pbpaste work in your terminal.

See also the link bellow for a better explanation, it also provides some work-arounds: https://github.com/ChrisJohnsen/tmux-MacOSX-pasteboard#mac-os-x-pasteboard-access-under-tmux-and-screen

I’m closing this because this is not an issue of atom-shell.

zcbenz on Jan 2, 2015