Pasting and Clipboards

I am working in TheBrain using a MacBook Air with 4GB RAM and OS 10.11.6.

I would like to use a piece of boilerplate that indicates that I have viewed a particular citation at a particular date and time, so I have written a macro that says: Insert Text by Pasting
Citation Viewed %LongDate% %ShortTime%

If I have just started the program and trigger this, it works perfectly, but if, before triggering it, I happen to copy something into my Clipboard, the contents of the Clipboard is what comes out instead.

I use a palette with several variations and the same trigger so I can indicate the source of the citation, but no matter which one I call up, I still get the contents of the Clipboard.

By the way, I use CopyPaste Pro to manage my Clipboard rather than Keyboard Maestro. No particular reason, just that I have been using it for even longer than I have KM.

Anybody got any ideas why this is happening? Thanks!

Hey Jimmy,

This is because the developer is doing something non-standard with the clipboard.

To troubleshoot:

  1. Turn off CopyPaste Pro and make certain sure it's not the problem.
  2. Copy a bunch of text and then run the following macro.
    a. You MUST move the macro to your TheBrain group first –
    it's currently associated with BBEdit – since I don't have TheBrain.

Troubleshooting ⇢ Text Insertion by Pasting.kmmacros (2.5 KB)

-Chris

You might try Insert Text by Typing instead of Pasting.
For short amounts of text there should not be much difference in time. IAC, it might help you identify the issue.

Thanks! I guess I should have mentioned I already tried that. It doesn’t help.

I’ve been wondering if I could make it a Named Clipboard. I’m not clear on how to do that either.

Did you try doing as @ccstone suggested:

It would be best for you to upload your macro (file and image) so we can inspect.
See KM Wiki: How to Post/Upload Your Macro to the Forum

You might also try this for troubleshooting:

  1. Manually copy some text
  2. Activate TheBrain app
  3. Trigger a KM macro that just sets the System Clipboard to your desired text
  4. Manually view the KM Clipboard History Switcher to verify that the text from Step #3 is at the top of the history (meaning it is on the System Clipboard), then close the Clipboard History window.
  5. Do a manual paste

Is the proper text pasted into TheBrain?

Thanks, everybody! I turned off CopyPaste and everything seemed to work fine. So I copied some text and pasted it and that worked. Then I went back to paste the Macro and that was fine. Then I turned CopyPaste back on and pasted the Macro and it all “just worked”. I guess I’m just going to have to go on using it normally to see if it starts acting up again. Thanks! again.

Sounds like CopyPaste got out-of-wack (technical term) somehow. LOL

I’d glad you’ve resolved the issue, at least for now.

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