Clipboard randomly stops working between macOS and RDP sessions

Hello

Sorry for the inconvenience. I haven't seen any other reports like this.

From your description, it sounds like our understanding of the pasteboard change count (a system-provided number that gets incremented every time the pasteboard changes) is getting out-of-sync with reality.

Are you using any third party clipboard management software (e.g. Maccy)? Are you using the built-in universal clipboard to share pasteboard data between devices (this means - "Allow handoff" is enabled in System Settings > Airdrop and Continuity > Allow Handoff, and you have other devices like a phone or iPad consuming the feature)? Do you have clipboard history enabled for Spotlight (System Settings > Spotlight > Clipboard history...)?

All of those things would help me understand the situation better

Thanks and kind regards,

Hello,

Thanks for the answer.

Yes, I do have Maccy installed and running, so that could potentially be related to the issue.

Handoff is enabled on my Mac.

For Spotlight, clipboard history is disabled

Hello,

Thank you for the additional information.

Since Maccy is currently installed and running, could you temporarily disable it and see if the clipboard issue occurs again while using RDP sessions in Remote Desktop Manager?

This would help us determine whether Maccy may be interfering with the macOS clipboard synchronization.

Please let us know if the issue still occurs with Maccy disabled.

Best regards,

Hello,

Thank you for the additional information.

Since Maccy is currently installed and running, could you temporarily disable it and see if the clipboard issue occurs again while using RDP sessions in Remote Desktop Manager?

This would help us determine whether Maccy may be interfering with the macOS clipboard synchronization.

Please let us know if the issue still occurs with Maccy disabled.

Best regards,

@Carl Marien

Hello

Thank you for the suggestion.

I have configured Remote Desktop Manager as an ignored application in Maccy. Maccy also allows certain pasteboard types to be ignored, although I’m not sure whether that would help in this particular case.

I’ll test with these settings and see if they resolve the clipboard issue I was experiencing. If the issue persists, I’ll temporarily disable Maccy completely and test again.

I’ll let you know the results.

Hello,

Thank you for the update!

Please let us know how it goes with these settings. If the issue persists, we can continue investigating from there. 🙂

Best regards,

I don't know if it's related, but the copy username and password action doesn't work at all, even when Maccy isn't running.

Hello

The implication is that something is interfering with clipboard handling, and maybe seizing the clipboard contents on a local copy in a way that we're not anticipating.

When you copy username / password, RDM tags the copied values in a way that is supposed to stop a password manager intercepting them (because, typically, you don't want a copied password for example showing up in your clipboard history).

It's possible that the clipboard contents are still getting seized, but with those copies "flagged" whoever seized the clipboard now has nothing to paste.

To be clear - I'm not saying the issue you see isn't on the RDM side, just something that we're not expecting that we need to account for.

If you temporarily disable handoff as well, does the copy username/password start working as expected?

Thanks for your patience

Kind regards,

Hello

The implication is that something is interfering with clipboard handling, and maybe seizing the clipboard contents on a local copy in a way that we're not anticipating.

When you copy username / password, RDM tags the copied values in a way that is supposed to stop a password manager intercepting them (because, typically, you don't want a copied password for example showing up in your clipboard history).

It's possible that the clipboard contents are still getting seized, but with those copies "flagged" whoever seized the clipboard now has nothing to paste.

To be clear - I'm not saying the issue you see isn't on the RDM side, just something that we're not expecting that we need to account for.

If you temporarily disable handoff as well, does the copy username/password start working as expected?

Thanks for your patience

Kind regards,

@Richard Markiewicz

Hello,

Thanks for the explanation. I did some further testing and was able to trace the issue to BetterTouchTool. Once BetterTouchTool is disabled, the “copy username and password” actions in RDM work as expected.

It looks like BetterTouchTool is interfering with the clipboard handling, probably by capturing or modifying the clipboard contents after RDM places the protected values there.

Edit:

I found the cause of the issue. I have a custom hotkey configuration in BTT that types the clipboard contents. I guess I’ll have to live without this RDM feature because I can’t disable BTT — I rely on it too much for my workflow.

Hello,

Thank you for the additional information.

Since Maccy is currently installed and running, could you temporarily disable it and see if the clipboard issue occurs again while using RDP sessions in Remote Desktop Manager?

This would help us determine whether Maccy may be interfering with the macOS clipboard synchronization.

Please let us know if the issue still occurs with Maccy disabled.

Best regards,

@Carl Marien

Update to this. Adding RDM as ignored application in Maccy did not solve the issue.

Hello

Thanks for the update, this is important information.

BTT has it's own clipboard manager that continuously polls the clipboard and records what it sees. Do you have that feature enabled? Note from the thread, that toggling that feature requires a restart of BTT. If it's the case we could be seeing an interaction between BTT, Maccy and RDM.

With regard to it breaking the copy username / password feature, that might be something we can address independently.

Thanks and kind regards,