John,

I just tested this in my windows based system and there is no such problem.

But I see you are copying from Word running in Windows into XPP running on Linux.
That means that Exceed is sitting in between both worlds as a complicating factor.
There are some settings in Exceed that you needed to get right in order for the clipboard to work correctly.
Here is what the installation manual has to say about this:

Updating X Servers for Cut, Copy, and Paste
The following changes must be made to the X servers on each Windows client to
support cut, copy, and paste operations using the Windows clipboard within XPP and
between XPP and other software applications.
Exceed
1. In Configuration > Copy, Paste, and X selection, set the following:
• X Selection Associated with Edit Operations: CLIPBOARD
• Check Auto Copy X selection.
• Uncheck Copy on Focus Loss.
• Check Auto Paste to X Selection.
• Grab Clipboard Retry Time (ms): 200
• Auto Paste Delay Time (ms): 200
2. In Security, Access Control and System Administration, on the System
Administration Tab, uncheck X Server Copy/Paste.
3. Click Validate and Apply Changes.
4. Restart the X server.

If the problem still persists or you are unsure how to check things mentioned above, I would suggest you open up a ticket with SDL - sorry RWS support

Thanks Bart...I will check our Xconfig settings.

Settings were correct, these instructions were pretty much the same as they have been throughout the 9.X versions.  However, it was good to make sure the settings didn't get modified.

Hi John,

Yes, you may want to open a ticket with support ... but on looking briefly into this I'm thinking there is not much that we can do about this behavior. It appears to me to be something we have little control over in XPP itself.

The complication is that in your scenario you are dealing with a mix of environments (Linux and Windows) and because of that, as Bart said, you have Exceed (or an X/Server) in the mix as well.

XPP is running on Linux and this is basically an X11 application (now GTK-based instead of Motif-based), so it's using GTK calls to Copy/Paste to/from the "clipboard" and I'm assuming that the GTK calls are mapping to X11 calls. On Windows it's true that the XPP XyView and Sdedit programs are also GTK-based, but there's no X11 involved and no X/Server - I'm assuming that GTK must be mapping things to native Windows calls.

I'm also assuming (as did Bart) that the "external apps" you are talking about are native Windows programs like Word, which are using the Microsoft clipboard (and most likely this would also be true for the XyView and Sdedit programs when they are running on Windows).

And somewhere (outside of XPP itself), code and/or programs are interacting between the X11 and Microsoft implementations of their "clipboard". It's all very complicated.

For example, when I'm using a Remote Desktop (or Terminal Services) session I have observed that there is an "RDP Clipboard Monitor" (rdpclip.exe) process that's involved in Copy/Paste operations between that remote session and my laptop. I've found at times that things get "wedged" and I've had to kill and restart that rdpclip.exe process in my RD session. This is not X11 releated; just mentioning that to show that there's a lot of moving pieces involved.

As far as I can tell, in XPP we are doing the Copy/Paste operations using appropriate GTK "clipboard" calls and are not doing anything incorrectly.

The GTK documentation refers to the FreeDesktop Clipboard Specification.

One thing it mentions in that spec:

A remaining somewhat odd thing about X selections is that exiting the app you did a cut/copy from removes the cut/copied data from the clipboard, since the selection protocol is asynchronous and requires the source app to provide the data at paste time. The solution here would be a standardized protocol for a "clipboard daemon" so that apps could hand off their data to a daemon when they exit. Or alternatively, you can run an application such as xclipboard which constantly "harvests" clipboard selections.

I would conclude that your experience validates this behavior, since as you say when you exit the XPP division it appears to clear the XPP (or GTK/X11) clipboard. I've also observed the same behavior.

I've never tried it myself, but I wonder if the suggestion in that spec to run an application such as xclipboard would make things work better? It may not help.

So quick question, did the switch to GTK from MOTIF happen when XPP went from 9.3 to 9.4?  The users indicate it did work in the past.  The users did complain @ our 9.4 upgrade, but we had this on the back burner working other items.

It was with the XPP 9.2.0 release that we switched from Motif to GTK for the Sdedit/XyView programs on Linux and Windows (Solaris stayed with Motif).

I see you opened a ticket with customer support; that's good.

It is probably time to play with all of the various X Selection (aka clipboard) settings in Exceed to see if better overall behavior can be obtained (but I'm not very hopeful).

Jonathan,

  Last I read, only Exceed was certified as an X11 server for XPP.  I'm looking into the 9.4.1 documentation...but was curious if VcXsrv from sourceforge was looked at(patterned after Xming)?  I had tried xming at one point in the past but it did not like multiple pop up windows i.e. I could get to pathfinder, but it wouldn't open the division with the softkey menus.

VcXsrv seems to be working and I have been able to do the cut/paste from my laptop word doc and in the XPP division.  The clipboard seems to function as expected.  I'm looking at the keyboard settings now...but if you know this method is not going to work...you could save me some investigation.  

Yes, John, we've only qualified XPP with Exceed.

What that means is that if a customer decides to use a different X/Server and runs into problems, we will only try to reproduce the problem using Exceed and if we cannot reproduce the reported problem then we have to leave it as it (or blame it as) being a problem with that other X/Server.

But from what I've seen and heard, I do believe that some customers are (successfully) using X/Servers other than Exceed.

It may indeed be worth looking at the X Selection (or clipboard) settings between the two apps to see if anything pops out that you might want to twiddle with in the Exceed settings to see if you get better results.

Now that you've opened a ticket with support, at some point we'll be looking into that as well (i.e. do different X Selection settings in Exceed, than we currently document, make it work better).

I did try changing the clipboard settings, and check boxes in exceed and also did a Windows>Settings>Clipboard to sync across devices.  I was curious whether windows to the citrix>exceeed>XPP server might be viewed as "separate" devices.  No luck in any changes so far.

Hi John,

Just to let you know I did try to reproduce the problem, but at least today everything in my testing worked fine.

Of course, I may not (or do not) have the exact same scenario as you have.

Here is what I did for a test.

I'm using Exceed version 15.0.0.175, with all the documented settings for X Selection (same as you).

I have a Remote Desktop session, within which I have Exceed running. In that same RD session I’m logged in (via an xterm window) to a RHEL 7.9 system.

I run the xyview on that Linux system. I do a Copy within the xyview.

Then back directly on my laptop I open a file in Notepad++ (my “external source”).

In Notepad++ I do a Paste and I get the text I Copy'd from the xyview. I then select other text in Notepad++ and do a Copy.

I went back to my still running (Linux) xyview and did a Paste, and I did get the text Copy’d from Notepad++.

I do also have Exceed on my laptop (same version and same settings). So, to eliminate RD from the mix I started Exceed on my laptop and started an xterm window to login to a RHEL 7.9 system.

From local Exceed>xterm started a xyview and then performed the same Copy and Paste testing with Notepad++. The Copy from Notepad++ Paste'd fine back into the xyview.

So, I'm not seeing the problem you are describing - at least not today and with my limited testing.

Only other things I have running on my laptop are Outlook (email), Teams, Edge, Windows Explorer, Notepad++, and Remote Desktop (and Exceed when I started it to run the test w/o RD involved). Only things I have running in my RD session are Windows Explorer, Exceed, xterm, and dtterm.

But as I said before, in the past there have been times when I think I've seen something similar happen that you have described.

As I also said, I’m typically using Remote Desktop and there have been times when I’ve had to kill and restart the (Windows) rdpclip.exe process in my RD session to get “clipboard” things to function properly again between XPP in the RD and non-XPP apps running on my laptop.

This really should continue now within the ticket that you've opened with support. We don't really want to bore everyone else with all these details. 

I would ask that you respond now in the ticket with anything else you can point out that might be different in your scenario than what I tested that might be a factor?

Things like having multiple instances of the xyview and if so how you are interacting with them and the non-XPP app? Using Citrix (which I mention because in your last post you did make a reference to "citrix")? Etc.