Every so often I need to remind myself I can still do technical things. Then I feel the urge to write about it. This time, the rabbit hole starts with Ubuntu clipboard managers, and leads to debugging the desktop itself.
Digging into the nuts and bolts of the desktop is something I don't do very often, so I'm keeping some notes for posterity.
Credit - I used ChatGPT and Claude to help investigate everything, as well as lots of The Internet of course.
The setup
I've run Ubuntu on my laptop for many years. Ubuntu is great, but for some reason it doesn't come with a built-in clipboard manager. I ran Diodon for a long, long time - simple and handled everything I needed. Sadly, it stopped working a while back so I removed it and tried other options - none of which worked.
More setup
After lots of digging, plus some conversations with Claude, it became clear the problem was with the display server, Wayland. This has an enhanced security model over X11 which stops many of the top listed clipboard managers working - presumably including Diodon, back in the day. The solution was either to switch back to X11 (which then breaks support for touchpad swipes between desktops) or to use GPaste. Which also doesn't work.
Sigh
Yeah it's one of those problems. So down the rabbithole we go...
So, by default GPaste is blocked by the same security as the others. We can register it as a trusted shell extension ... if we have the extensions app installed... which we don't by default...
sudo apt install gnome-shell-extension-prefs
Ok, back on track. We can register it as a trusted shell extension with the extensions app:
gnome-extensions enable GPaste@gnome-shell-extensions.gnome.org
Which allows it to load properly (appears top right). Copy also now adds things to the clipboard list. If you're following along at home and it doesn't, turn on "Track changes" in the UI and all should be well.
Pasting from history?
Now you're able to click on the manager, look at the list and pick the entry you want to be on the clipboard. For me, doing this with the mouse destroys about 2/3 of the point of a clipboard manager - may as well just navigate back to the original data and copy from there. I need a keyboard shortcut to open the history except... the keyboard shortcuts don't seem to work.
Hhgggnnnn.
No matter - I can just change the binding to something. Except the rebinding screens don't work. Can't type into the boxes, and it doesn't capture keypress.
Argh.
This is, according to Claude, a "known quirk" with GPaste's settings UI. Which seems a polite way of saying "it's broken". Claude recommends setting it directly from the command line:
gpaste-client settings --set-string shortcuts-show-history "<Ctrl><Shift>H"
Yeah, that didn't work either. Silently ignored.
Now we're breaking out dconf-editor (which also needed installing) and navigating to:
/org/gnome/gpaste
and editing directly there.
And finally, finally it's working.
Conclusion
Well, this was frustrating. A stupidly long runaround to get to something that even Windows has built-in by default now. And the fixes are exactly the kind of thing that put normal people off using Linux - the kind of thing I thought we'd moved past a long time ago. Breaking out dconf-editor is the equivalent of having to use regedit for crying out loud.
On the Wayland / X11 choice, the touchpad gestures were fixable in X11 with some work. The real reason I didn't switch back was because I try to keep my Linux desktop as vanilla as possible. It seems likely that Wayland is the future for Ubuntu, so unless I want to change distro I may as well accept that.
Right, enough of this for the moment. More coming...
