Copy/paste of cells across notebooks doesn't work

[peter-ch]

I'm using the latest Jupyter notebook on Ubuntu 16.04 x64 with Chrome. When I click "Copy cells" in one notebook, it doesn't let me paste them in another. I thought the latest notebook has this feature, but it behaves just like the older version.

[gnestor]

I have also encountered this...

@takluyver Can you verify whether it's working for you on 5.0.0?

#1286

[takluyver]

To use the system clipboard and move cells between notebooks, you need to use Ctrl-(x/c/v), or their Cmd- equivalents on a Mac. The UI buttons and the x/c/v shortcuts still use our Javascript clipboard, which only works within the notebook. This is a browser limitation - we can only access the system clipboard when we're handling a native clipboard event.

I suspect that I'm going to be explaining the two clipboards issue for many years. I'll turn this into a saved reply on Github.

[dsblank]

This is a really confusing point. Surely some other things can be done, short of resolving the distinction? Change the UI? Remove the non-clipboard versions? Give a popup message the first time? We all are going to be attempting to explain this point for many years.

[takluyver]

Change the UI?

To what? ;-)

Remove the non-clipboard versions?

I hope that will eventually make sense, but at present I don't have enough confidence that the system clipboard mechanism works in all situations to drop the JS clipboard that's already well tested. And when we do, we'll be answering 'where did my clipboard buttons go?'

Give a popup message the first time?

Myeh. Messages that pop up while you're trying to do something are irritating, most users close them without really reading them, and it's tricky to reliably track whether we've shown a one-off message before.

I hope we can find a way to make it easier to understand, but at the moment I can't think of anything that really seems like an improvement. Except for making desktop apps like nteract, to avoid the limitations of the browser.

[peter-ch]

Thanks, Ctrl-C / V worked. It's not that I needed it so much (as just copying/pasting the text from the cells already does the job), but I thought it's a bug that slipped through.

[gnestor]

I observed that copying/pasting a cell using the command palette does work across notebooks.

[takluyver]

That's... surprising. 😕

[gnestor]

I observed that copying/pasting a cell using the command palette does work across notebooks.

That is, does not work across notebooks.

[takluyver]

Aha, that's what I'd expect. Again, we can only use the system clipboard when handling a clipboard event, and we can't trigger a clipboard event programmatically.

[takluyver]

Closing this because there's no clear fix we can make. I'm happy to keep discussing possible improvements, but so far I've not found any workable solution.