Improve clipboard yanking messages

[01mf02]

Summary

When selecting some text with the mouse, the message "yanked main selection to system clipboard" appears at the bottom, yet the clipboard does not seem to contain the selected text.

Reproduction Steps

I tried this:

1. hx
2. Type "Hello".
3. Select "Hello" with the mouse.
4. Open a GTK application such as Mousepad or Firefox, and paste with middle mouse button or CTRL-V (tried both).

I expected this to happen:

The text "Hello" should appear in the GTK application.

Instead, this happened:

Some previously selected text appears in the GTK application.

Helix log

Nothing interesting here.

Platform

Linux

Terminal Emulator

xfce4-terminal 0.8.10

Helix Version

22.05-10-g370a16d0

[the-mikedavis]

Does this only happen when using the mouse? Does Spacey work to copy a selection to the system clipboard?

[01mf02]

This happens both with mouse and Space y.

I found the culprit in the meanwhile: In helix-view/src/clipboard.rs, Helix checks for the existence of several tools, such as xsel and xclip to use for clipboard operations. If none of these tools is available, then a NopProvider is used which provides a Helix-specific clipboard, but this can be hardly called a "system clipboard".
Therefore, I find the message "yanked main selection to system clipboard" misleading.
After installing xclip, yanking works as expected.

I see several ways to improve the current situation:

• The error message in helix-term/src/commands.rs could be triggered when no clipboard tool is found. One way to achieve this would be to make the NopProvider always fail instead of always succeed.
• The message "yanked main selection to system clipboard" could be changed to something like "yanked main selection to Helix clipboard (install a clipboard tool to use system clipboard)" when no clipboard tool is found.

[the-mikedavis]

Yeah improving that error message would be great. I think I would prefer that the system clipboard commands fail when the contents can't be copied so it's more noticeable. What do others think?

[archseer]

Agreed!

[CptPotato]

Interestingly, selecting with the mouse doesn't work on Windows while Space + y works just fine.

[sudormrfbin]

Selecting with the mouse copies text to the secondary clipboard in Linux, which doesn't exist in Windows. We could copy to the clipboard for windows in this case, but that would probably be too disruptive - the secondary clipboard in Linux doesn't override the contents of a normal ctrl+c made in some other application, while in Windows (due to a lack of multiple clipboards) it will.

[DuckDuckWhale]

The distinction between mouse select and y isn't very clear:

• Mouse: yanked main selection to system clipboard
• Space + y: joined and yanked 1 selection(s) to system clipboard

It is not clear from this prompt that one of them goes to the middle click clipboard yet the other one goes to the normal (Ctrl+C/V) clipboard. Does anyone know what's the correct term for not only X (which I know are clipboard and primary) but also Wayland? (Maybe we just call them "system clipboard" and "system selection clipboard"? Also, the joined and yanked 1 selections(s) is unnecessary. Simply yanked selection to system clipboard would do.

[jquesada2016]

Copying to system clipboard via space+y does not work on Windows through WSL.

[the-mikedavis]

#2132