KM seems to be affecting my ability to copy/paste in Citrix and other apps... Help?

Questions & Suggestions
1

So I use Citrix to access corporate stuff on my Mac. In case someone's not familiar it's essentially a remote access client, it's like I have Windows in a window but it's all steaming in/out with a remote server. It's all self-contained and I assume to anything else on my Mac it just looks like a normal Mac app (not any emulation trickery like Parallels etc). Citrix handles syncing that remote clipboard with the system clipboard and is pretty much seamless normally (even handles translating keyboard shortcuts).

However lately I have been having a lot of issues with it. I have to hit cmd-c 3 or 4 times for it to trigger in the remote app, and then when I paste over in the Mac side it'll paste twice (like it was repeated) or it'll paste, but then suddenly my clipboard will be empty when I try to paste it again. The receiving app on the Mac side doesn't seem to matter, I've had issues in Chrome, VS Code, Powerpoint, and a few others. But Citrix is always involved.

Now I wouldn't go blaming Keyboard Maestro for no reason, but the problem started up about the same time I started using it AND goes away if I quit the engine, which I discovered a few days ago. This is the 3rd day I've been able to repeat that as the fix, so it wasn't a fluke. The thing is I have no macros setup with any of these apps in mind, no Groups watching them or macros intended to interact with them. KM didn't show any running Macros (based on the cancel menu). And all my global macros are triggered by Status Menu, Palette, or Hotkeys (none of which are the c's, x's, or v's of clipboard ops). So I'm really not sure how it could be the cause... Any known interactions with Citrix maybe? Or something else that could be in the middle causing problems? Does the way KM does clipboard stuff maybe kick in automatically and is glitching?

Any ideas are appreciated.

2

I use Citrix as well. When logging into my work computer, via VPN, it's sandboxed so I don't expect to use KM's additional clipboards while working in a remote vpn session. Since I'm technically on my work Windows machine, I can't copy and paste between my Mac and the windows box. Everything else work fine. I have an Outlook palette that works miracles when filing emails.

3

Keyboard Maestro’s clipboard history (like pretty much any other clipboard history application) works by noticing when the clipboard changes, and then reading the clipboard and storing all the various flavors of clipboard data.

Some applications do not like the or expect the clipboard to be read immediately, or do not like other applications reading specific clipboard flavors but neglect to mark the flavors as private. Also, some application make some changes to the clipboard and then other changes later.

By all accounts, Citrix is a bizarre application which does its own thing in many respects, so I'm afraid I can't really tell you what it might be doing that causes problems with either copying or pasting. Other than excluding it from the clipboard history (with the Keyboard Maestro Excluded preferences), I don't have any other suggestions. Why it would impact pasting, I have no idea.

4

Thanks! I'll give the exclude option a try, did not even realize it was there.

5

@kcwhat Yeah, in my case our policies allow copy/paste between which is really handy.