xclip and xsel don't work with wl-copy/wl-paste

[hyperair]

I see a number of Xwayland clipboard discussions, but I'm not sure if they're related to this.

wayland -> xwayland

When the clipboard owner is any Wayland app (e.g. wl-copy), xclip and xsel don't seem to be able to see their contents:

% echo -n wayland | wl-copy
% wl-paste
wayland
% xclip -out
Error: target STRING not available
% xclip -out -verbose
Connected to X server.
Using UTF8_STRING.
Error: target STRING not available
% xclip -out -verbose -target TARGETS
Connected to X server.
Using TARGETS.
Error: target TARGETS not available
% xclip -out -verbose -noutf8
Connected to X server.
Using old UNICODE instead of UTF8.
Error: target STRING not available
% wl-paste
wayland
% wl-paste -l
text/plain
text/plain
text/plain;charset=utf-8
TEXT
STRING
UTF8_STRING

However, it looks like Gtk+ apps running in Xwayland work, e.g. WAYLAND_DISPLAY='' DISPLAY=:0 zenity --entry. I did confirm that zenity is running in xwayland:

% hyprctl clients -j | jq '.[] | select(.xwayland) | { class, title, xwayland }'
{
  "class": "zenity",
  "title": "Add a new entry",
  "xwayland": true
}

xwayland -> wayland

Conversely, if xclip is the clipboard owner, it looks like Wayland apps (wl-paste, zenity) do not receive a value from xclip:

% echo -n wayland | wl-copy
% echo x11 | xclip -in -selection clipboard
% wl-paste
wayland
% xclip -out -selection clipboard
x11

I'm running Hyprland 0.51.0 on Ubuntu 25.04:

Hyprland 0.51.0 built from branch  at commit 46174f78b374b6cea669c48880877a8bdcf7802f  (version: bump to 0.51.0).
Date: Wed Sep 10 12:41:05 2025
Tag: v0.51.0, commits: 6418
built against:
 aquamarine 0.9.3
 hyprlang 0.6.0
 hyprutils 0.8.4
 hyprcursor 0.1.9
 hyprgraphics 0.1.5


no flags were set

[hyperair]

There's some rather strange additional behaviour going on with zenity on xwayland.

If you run this:

wl-copy <<<wayland1
wl-copy -p <<<wayland2
xclip -in -selection primary <<<x11-p
xclip -in -selection clipboard <<<x11-clip

And then ctrl+v into zenity on xwayland, you'll get wayland1\n. And middle click gets you wayland2\n, suggesting that somehow eventhough xsel and xclip see the xclip values, zenity in xwayland gets the wayland values.

[Moerliy]

That is a problem for quite a while now but wasn't ez to fix.

The x11 clipboard and the one Wayland uses do not play well. There was an issue a while back with some workaround but they came with some problems themself. I'm still looking for a good solution tho.

The issue in question: 6603