[TxMt] Pasteboard Server Error

[Allan Odgaard]

On 13/09/2007, at 06:21, Rob McBroom wrote:

> On Sep 12, 2007, at 4:06 PM, Jeff Clark wrote:
>
>> TextMate will work fine for a run or two but it quickly becomes  
>> dead to the world of copy-and-paste (other than internally).
>
> I had never experienced (or heard about) this until today. I didn't  
> realize it was a known problem, but I eventually logged out/in and  
> that seemed to fix it. I thought it was a fluke, but now you have me  
> worried that it will become common.

One of the workarounds linked to at the page is from 2004 -- so this  
is not a new problem.

> Anyway, I can also confirm that it was only TextMate that couldn't  
> be copied to or from.

There is a global ‘pbs’ process which acts as a server. Each program  
talks (indirectly) with this to participate in clipboard sharing.

What seems to happen is that the ‘pbs’ process drops one of its  
clients. So it will seem like the client is at fault, although copy/ 
paste for the client still works fine.

I am pretty sure this is not my fault since:

  1. I never talk directly with the pbs server, I use NSPasteboard
  2. Most users report that relaunching the pbs process fixes it
  3. This problem has been seen for other applications
  4. When TextMate is cut off, it affects everything in TextMate, i.e.  
also system controls, drag’n’drop, etc.

>> I had never experienced this problem until I updated to the latest  
>> version (1.5.6 (1414))  several weeks ago.
>
> Are you also using the clipboard module in Quicksilver? I initially  
> thought that was to blame for mucking things up (although it's been  
> installed for months), so I disabled it, but that obviously didn't  
> help. However, I haven't ruled out that some sort of interaction  
> between TextMate and the Quicksilver clipboard module caused this,  
> which is why I bring it up. I've also updated Quicksilver recently  
> to 3804 for what it's worth (although the Clipboard module is  
> unchanged).

There is a high probability that this is caused by something on the  
system [1] seeing how some users see the problem a lot, and most never  
ever see it (I personally have never experienced it for TextMate, but  
once for OmniWeb).

For those who do experience it a lot, it would be good to report it at https://bugreport.apple.com/-- 
  Apple has the source for both the pbs server, the NSPasteboard  
“wrapper”, and the insight into how data is shared between  
applications, so they would be able to at least look at the components  
involved and/or request more data from affected users.

[1]: Or perhaps related to the data which goes to the clipboard.