I upgraded to MacOS Sierra yesterday, and since then I cannot copy paste across apps.
For eg. copying text from chrome allows me to paste it in chrome, but pastes nothing on safari or my text editor.
This probably has something to do with Universal Copy/Paste ? How can I disable it? Can't do any productive work without copy/paste
MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch,Early 2015), macOS Sierra (10.12)
I found a solution that worked for me:
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I *Copied and *Pasted this from: (https://danwarne.wordpress.com/2014/03/05/fix-stuck-mac-os-clipboard-copypaste/)
"
Something has been bugging me with OS X for a while — sometimes the OS X clipboard (officially known as “pasteboard”) gets stuck and won’t accept any new ‘copied’ content. Instead, when you ‘paste’ in any app, the clipboard always pastes back the last thing you successfully copied.
One solution to this is to reboot the Mac, but since Mac OS X is generally so stable and doesn’t need to be periodically rebooted as a matter of course, rebooting a machine with many open apps and windows can be a hassle.
Searching for this issue online provides a lot of bad advice (one website I saw said “repair permissions and if that doesn’t work, reinstall the OS”… terrible advice.)
Other websites incorrectly advise to kill the PBS process and restart it.
Apple’s manual page for PBS notes it is not related to the Pasteboard process. Instead, the correct process to kill is PBoard.
So, to fix a stuck clipboard (pasteboard) problem, you simply need to:
1. Open your application folder
2. Open the utilities subfolder
3. Open the Activity Monitor app
4. Type “pboard” into the search box at the top right
5. In the search results below, there should only be one result — a row listing the “pboard” process. Highlight it by clicking on it.
6. Click the “x” button at the top left of the window which represents ‘quit this process’
Once you’ve done that, OS X will kill the faulty PBoard process and re-establish it with a fresh one automatically. Your clipboard should be back to normal.
I have a suspicion that this stuck clipboard is a bug in OS X Mavericks 10.9 – I don’t recall it happening before I installed that. It is still an (infrequent) current problem as at 10.9.2."
I don't know if someone has already but the fix is in Stackoverflow: high sierra - clipboard not working after Security Update - Ask Different, namely rebuild the cache for for shared system services with this obscure command as superuser:
sudo update_dyld_shared_cacheMy comment is not directed to @pastelsky but to Apple itself.
Are we really being asked to convert to safe mode or reboot every time we need to copy and paste?
This is obviously a long time but seeing the number of people with the same issue. Is it possible to have more resources focused on this issue?
Thank you
I am running into the same issue and I think I found the culprit.
First, let me state that reboot fixes the issue... but not cool.
Killing the pboard process did not help in my case.
Paste does work but it contains always the old content of the clipboard.
Strangely, if you test in chrome to copy paste in the URL bar, things work fine 😮
The 'solution' I found is to kill chrome and restart it, then everything rolls again. This is at least better than having to reboot.
Genius! Thank you...this has been bothering me for ages. Probably years, but because it is a sporadic problem I just put up with it. Kept getting the blank white square this morning and decided to look for a fix and luckily got your soluiton as opposed to the nuclear 'reinstall' and 'it's not mac's fault' suggestions.
This reply is to Alex's suggestion to kill the 'pboard' process in Activity monitor.
The exact same thing just happened to me. I upgraded directly from Yosemite 10.10.5 to High Sierra and upped it to 10.13.3, and my copy/paste is broken. Nothing else is different. I performed the upgrade this morning. I tried the solution offered about about killing pboard, and it didn't work. So I rebooted; it's still broken; and here I am. What now?
OK, I don't have my problem fixed yet, but I have an avenue to explore. I'm on a new platform that used to belong to another user. I simply moved my install disk and a couple other disks over to that machine and then upgraded from Yosemite. I seem to have a disk permissions issue that's not letting me copy to another drive.
Maybe this idea will help someone else.
I solved my "copy/paste" problem.
It wasn't copy/paste at the root of it. It was SIP, which was interfering with my Paragon NTFS for Mac. High Sierra had apparently disabled write access to my NTFS partitions. I had to boot to the recovery partition to use Terminal to enter "csrutil disable" to disable SIP. After reboot, Paragon was able to let me change permissions on those disks. I presume it will now be safe to reenable SIP.
How can this be? I cannot copy and paste??? Tried the reboot, the safe mode... A software I use started crashing after the update which is bad enough, but copy and paste is NOT ok.
Sierra is the new Windows Vista!
Read my replies to the same thread and see if what happens to me also applies to you. Do you have NTFS partitions, and are you using Paragon's software to paste into them?
Probably the first thing to do is to look at the Info for the disk you are trying to copy into and see if you have write access.
OK, I don't know then. Try reading this thread from the very beginning and see whether any of the expert answers apply to you. I'm not an expert, but some people here are. I'm in High Sierra, which I updated directly into from Yosemite, and the only problems I've had other than what I mistakenly thought was a copy/paste issue have to do with using some nonstandard software that Sierra's tightened security doesn't like, but I found workarounds.
As one of the responders said, if Sierra were so bad as to break copy/paste, they'd have millions of users mad at them, so it has to involve something you're doing that it thinks you shouldn't be that's interfering with copy/paste. There's a way to force quit the copy/paste process and reload it. Again, start at page one of this thread. Good luck!
Ah I feel as if I have come home (i.e. I am not the only one suffering this problem!)
I updated to High Sierra 10.13.3 some time ago but the problem only arose today. I can't copy or paste, either in Pages or Word. When I edit using Word, I get the automatic advice that there isn't enough memory or disc space to perform the function. I can't even copy and paste in the browser window. Hopefully it is a temporary glitch that some update will fix tomorrow. Meanwhile it has got me very worried. Unable to copy and paste is unable to edit text in any meaningful way, and I have a lot of work riding on this. Bugger computers quite frankly. 😕
Thanks for the suggestion but I tried that and it didn't work. Also I have now fixed the problem in a way that seems good enough to me. I used the Time Machine function to revert to an older setting, and I have disabled Apple's automated updates to prevent further issues. My laptop should function in its current mode till replacement some years down the track, I hope. We'll see!
406Dev wrote:
My comment is not directed to @pastelsky but to Apple itself.
And Apple isn't reading here. If you want Apple to hear you, use the feedback page:
Try safe mode if your Mac doesn‘t finish starting up
How to test an issue in another user account on your Mac
Best Regards.
Try the advice you've been given about Safe Mode. I'd be extremely surprised if this failed to work correctly in Safe Mode.
If it does work correctly, try again in normal mode.
If it still fails after that, then it is likely that some other software that is installed on your mac is causing the problem.
If that is the case, run Etrecheck (an utility by a respected member of this community) and post its report here, so we have a better idea of your hardware and software setup so we can better help.
Copy/Paste broken in MacOS Sierra
