Enabling "Clipboard" with built-in VNC

To clarify, the Mac does not have built-in VNC. The Mac has "Screen Sharing", which is a stripped down version of Apple Remote Desktop. Screen Sharing does support the VNC protocol somewhat. But then, the best you can say of any VNC tool is that it supports the VNC protocol "somewhat".

Other than the nachos context, I don't know what Guacamole is. I also don't know what PPPCs are. This is a user-to-user support community. Most people have no idea what MDM is and few of them have any experience in it at all.

I had similar difficulties getting clipboard to work with my remote Ubuntu server running the default, and horrible, vino VNC server. My experience is similar to that of BobHarris. I can copy from the server but not paste to it. I searched for a solution but eventually just gave up.

I also have a remote Mac running Screen sharing where the clipboard works fine. I don't even have Apple Remote Desktop.

If you want full functionality, you will probably have to run the same remote control software on both ends.

I can screen share macOS High Sierra onto my Big Sur 11.6.4 screen, and when I copy an image to the clipboard, it is shown there, but only pastes as the text string of its clipboard name on Big Sur. If that wasn't enough limitation, adding Guacamole in the middle cannot improve this information sharing.

When you copy something to the clipboard on macOS, it is placed there in several different data formats that the built-in Finder Show Clipboard does not show. Depending on how applications on the Mac are written, there is a variety of data formats written to the clipboard during a copy and specific formats expected during paste operations.

From the Apple Developer site, there is an Additional Tools for Xcode 13.2 package (not a direct download) that contains Clipboard Viewer which allows one to see the litany of data on the clipboard from a copy operation.

Paste from Mac to remote VNC server does not work.

Copy from remote VNC server to Mac seems to work.

If you are doing Mac-to-Mac Screen Sharing full Copy & Paste works, as well as dragging and dropping files to or from the remote system.

Try a different VNC client, such as TigerVNC (it is what we use at work).

https://tigervnc.org

Or

RealVNC

https://www.realvnc.com/en/connect/download/viewer/

I do not know anything about Guacamole. If the Macs are talking to each other, then full Copy & Paste support should work. But if the Mac client thinks it is talking to a generic VNC server, it looses the ability to do Paste.

I do not know why it cannot paste, but at work, we VNC into Linux systems, and the built-in VNC client is good for viewing, and typing, and pointing, and clicking, but Paste it does not do. Which is why at work we use TigerVNC.

Will Guacamole allow you to ssh to the remote Macs? If you can, then tunnel port 5900 and that should work

ssh -L 59022:localhost:5900 username@remote.mac.addr

Finder -> Go (menu) -> Connect to server -> localhost:59022

The 5900 is the VNC port that the remote Mac's built-in VNC server will be listening on. The 59022 is just an arbitrary high port number on your local Mac that you use to anchor the ssh tunnel on your local Mac. It can be just about anything, as long as it does not conflict with existing protocols you are using, and is not less than 1024 (privileged ports).

Kenneth Close wrote:

It's maddening that in order to get full functionality outside of a fully Mac environment, we need to replace the built-in VNC service with something else.

Traditional VNC is not Apple's central focus. The fact that they will talk to a traditional VNC server is just a side effect of having most of the protocol there already, but they are not going out of their way to make it perfect.

Mac-to-Mac Screen Sharing "is" one of Apple's focal points. And when you have a direct connection, it works seamlessly.

But you did not do straight Mac-to-Mac connections, you stuck something in the middle that forces traditional VNC, and thus you broke away from Apple's focus and confused things.

Re: etresoft, we (as in the members of my group at work) have struggled with VNC copy & paste with Linux system for the past 17 years, and I've gone though a lot of different clients. I've personally tried every Rube Goldberg trick I could think of, even if the end result was worse, just to see if I could find a loop-hole. No Joy.

At least the more recent TigerVNC and RealVNC clients offer some satisfaction.

On the other hand, at work, they new-and-improved the Linux servers so much (as in paired them down to the smallest boot disk they could get away with, so they could have more VM's) that I found I could not get a decent Linux desktop running, so I abandoned using VNC in favor of ssh to a tmux session and do everything that way. I was already living in terminal emulators, the main switch was having the terminal emulator running on my Mac (iTerm2) as apposed to the terminal emulator running on Linux and my access via VNC.

tmux keeps my remote sessions alive, so I can connect/disconnect as needed, such as the company mandatory VPN must disconnect after 24 hours rule, or Mac reboots, Mac going to sleep, etc... tmux does not care if I come or go, it just keeps my remote session alive.

Granted this is not helpful for Kenneth Close (our OP), but my days of using VNC may have been useful.

Chicken has been my preferred VNC client on my Mac to connect to Linux servers running vncserver. Since updating to Monterey, Chicken is crashing frequently and I'm looking for a better option. I am trying the Mac built-in screen share -- the clipboard sharing and other edit options are grayed out in the drop-down menu. Is there some way to enable that or is the graying out a "feature" that only works between Macs?

I tried TigerVNC -- it's buggy and the interface is terrible on Monterey so far. Maybe there is something I need to do to configure it to be easier to use? And RealVNC seems to only be available as a paid option.

JollyFastVNC is another I've tried -- it doesn't seem to be happy connecting over ssh tunnels to the Linux vncserver.