Very strange behavior with COPY simulation (kd:cmd t:c)

[johnwuelk]

Thanks a million for this awesome software!

Copying with cliclick (version 5.1 via homebrew) does not work when there is another command before it.
For example the following does not work/copy:

cliclick kd:shift kp:arrow-down ku:shift
cliclick kd:cmd t:c ku:cmd

I tried it together as a one-liner, in a script and even with sleep periods between the commands and each option - it still does not copy.

Whereas the following does work, when only running the one single command without a command perceding it:
cliclick kd:cmd t:c ku:cmd

I'm curious to know what causes this weird behavior.

My workaround which works (copying via accessing the menu (Shift+Command+/ )
cliclick kd:shift,cmd t:/ ku:shift,cmd t:copy kp:arrow-down kp:return

[BlueM]

I tried to reproduce this and I partially succeeded. I could reproduce it reliably with text in TextEdit, whereas in most cases it did work with text in Visual Studio Code. In what application was the text you tried to copy?

For the record, with TextEdit did not work …

osascript -e 'tell app "TextEdit" to activate' && cliclick kd:shift kp:arrow-down ku:shift kd:cmd t:c ku:cmd

… while this did:

osascript -e 'tell app "TextEdit" to activate' && cliclick kd:cmd t:c ku:cmd

[johnwuelk]

Interesting. It was in the Chrome browser.

[BlueM]

Regardless of the potential problem: using cliclick for something like this is pretty brittle. I’d go for …

#!/bin/bash

theSelection=$(osascript -e 'tell application "Google Chrome" to tell active tab of front window to execute javascript "window.getSelection().toString()"')

echo 'Selected text in Chrome: “'$theSelection'”'

That’s what macOS is all about, right? Bash executing AppleScript telling Chrome to execute Javascript ;-)

[johnwuelk]

Thanks! I'm using Bash and AppleScript now, although I really wanted to avoid that because I was used to xdotool on Linux and wanted a very similar tool for my MacBook M4 which would be yours.