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I am connected to a remote system via Screen Sharing. I have text (plaintext) on my clipboard locally. I am unable to paste into the remote system. How can I make this work? Here are some details:

  • When I open the Edit menu, only "Copy" is available, "Paste", "Send Clipboard" and "Get Clipboard" and so on are grayed out.

  • The buttons for "Send Clipboard" and "Get Clipboard" are grayed out.

    enter image description here

Some other facts:

  • The clipboard functions work ok with JollyFastVNC and Chicken of the VNC (but I have other problems with these).
  • Both local and remote systems are on OSX 10.6.8
  • Keyboard and mouse functionality works fine to remote system
  • The remote system's local clipboard works fine -- if I CTL-V in a screen on the remote system, I paste what is on the remote system's clipboard (hope that makes sense)
  • It doesn't matter what app I'm in on the remote system
jlarson
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  • Are you sure your clipboard is not empty? Send Clipboard being grayed out would indicate it is. – Gerry Sep 28 '11 at 15:04
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    Yep, I am sure. I can copy and paste in my local apps just fine. If I copy something from TextWrangler locally, then go to Screen Sharing, I see what I've screenshot above. – jlarson Sep 28 '11 at 15:09
  • What result do you get from doing it the other way around? so copy from teh shared screen to yours. – Graeme Hutchison Nov 15 '11 at 15:40
  • I would recommend checking the 'Sharing' preferences on that machine to make sure everything is allowed and there is no conflict with ARD (Remote Management) settings. You might want to just trying turning those two sharing features off then rebooting even. – NOTjust -- user4304 Jan 06 '13 at 01:41
  • Have you tried copying from Safari or another native OSX app? Maybe TextWrangler isn't really using the system keyboard? – c.apolzon Oct 13 '11 at 18:32
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    great suggestion, but yes, I have, from Outlook, Safari, Chrome... wherever... – jlarson Oct 14 '11 at 14:25
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    I had been hoping that MacOS mojave would fix this but nope, it seems it is one of the many areas they have not touched.... – gae123 Oct 10 '18 at 23:29

5 Answers5

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Apple answer: https://support.apple.com/kb/PH14152

Choose Edit >Use Shared Clipboard. Using the shared clipboard, you can:

Copy text and images from documents on one Mac and paste them into documents on the other.

Select and drag text and images from one Mac to the other.

Copy a link from your web browser and paste it into a web browser on the other Mac.

Copy text from a document on one Mac and drop it on the desktop of the other Mac to create a clipping.

Community
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jurevert
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I just disconnected my screen sharing session and re-connected and the copy/paste started working again.

Kevin Wessell
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  • this worked for me until the next time I needed to copy/paste, at which point I had to disconnect and re-connect a second time. – Michael Feb 22 '15 at 02:54
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You can drag and drop what you want to copy over. This works on Lion, and I'd imagine it would work on earlier versions of OS X.

Tuesday
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falcn
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  • drag and drop text from my local app to a remote system? or drag and drop files from local finder to remote finder? either way, neither works. – jlarson Oct 19 '11 at 16:57
  • I can't find the documentation to back up that it was NOT available in Snow Leopard (10.6) but this was hailed as a new feature by many blogs when either Lion or Mountain Lion launched. – Mr Rabbit Jul 29 '13 at 19:24
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On my mac, the copy function is resource dependent. If I have too many items open consuming too much OS/RAM/etc then copy paste will not work. It recovers when I close some things.

AnneTheAgile
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You could alternatively use the inbuilt VNC viewer to screen share, it has a "Get Remote Clipboard" and "Put to Remote Clipboard" feature that would overcome the issue you're having.

Instructions

OrangeBox
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