Comments on: Supporting the system clipboard in your Web Applications: Part Two

By: Brook Novak

Brook Novak — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 10:23:14 +0000

Awesome articles, very helpful. I also used the textarea technique in my web app to get at the system clipboard via keystrokes – but i never thought of using tiny floats… thanks!

I have also written a similar article at http://brooknovak.wordpress.com/2009/07/28/accessing-the-system-clipboard-with-javascript/ which explores some other approaches, check it out

Cheers

By: Sam Goody

Sam Goody — Sun, 17 May 2009 19:45:07 +0000

Having read both articles and looked at the code –

1)
Are you able to have a ‘copy’ button/icon and a ‘paste’ button/icon that lets you copy/paste from an external editor into the browser?
If so, how? Can you give a more generic (non-Dojo) description?

2)
If not, why is Ctrl-XCV not working – isn’t this supported by all browsers? (IE. I just copied and pasted this post from Notepad++)

By: Wired Earp

Wired Earp — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 11:51:28 +0000

@liucougar: In Firefox, the onpaste/oncut/oncopy events fire too late, or too weird, for this to work. Key combo listeners will do the trick, but the odd fact is that paste combo Shift+Insert is mangled: The textarea receives the focus alright, but nothing gets pasted into it.

By: liucougar

liucougar — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 07:21:18 +0000

IMO, a better way of doing this is listening to onpaste/oncut/oncopy, instead of listening to onkeydown of ctrl+v/ctrl+x/ctrl+c

keyboard shortcut will trigger onpaste/oncut/oncopy (right after onkeydown), so for keyboard events, it works the same, while this also works if user choose copy/paste/cut from the brower Edit menu or from the native browser context menu (if the native context menu is used there)

By: unscriptable

unscriptable — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 23:04:16 +0000

@Dave,

If you notice, Dion is using tabIndex=-1. This prevents the text area from getting focus. If for some reason you can’t use this, then you could just use right: 101% to position the text area. This won’t scroll the page if it gets focus.

– John

By: Dave Johnson

Dave Johnson — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 19:18:52 +0000

One thing that we ran into with the hidden textarea approach is placement of the textarea element. When the textarea gets focus it will try to scroll to that position on the page (-100px in this case). Not a problem for Bespin since the browser scroll bar is not used I guess :) but can be annoying in a general case.

By: Dion Almaer

Dion Almaer — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 05:46:03 +0000

@Ben,

Ah yes, I *really* don’t want this to happen to you again (and anyone else). Also, just in case, I will be the large chap with glasses, and Ben is the slightly taller and smaller chap.

Some bad photos: http://www.flickr.com/search/?w=all&q=Ben+Galbraith+Dion+Almaer&m=text

Looking forward to meeting you there!

By: Dion Almaer

Dion Almaer — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 05:42:31 +0000

@unscriptable,

Great points. We do use pub/sub as a way to event into the right scope. _editor is a cheat for this example. I *love* pub/sub (and will do a post on our usage of that shortly).

I changed the code to use the copynpaster too, great idea. Thanks!

By: Dion Almaer

Dion Almaer — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 05:32:43 +0000

@James,

Ah, good point. I will have to test to see if CTRL-Insert/SHIFT-Insert fire the on* events for WebKit. On Firefox, if they cause a copy/paste then I should be able to just wire them up and be good to go.

Thanks! Filed this as a bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=481801

By: James MacFarlane

James MacFarlane — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 21:12:07 +0000

Hi Dion,

Being left-handed, I never use Cmd/Ctrl-C X V. I would have to take my hand off the mouse to do that. I use CTRL-Insert (copy) and SHIFT-Insert (paste).

This works in almost every Windows app, except for those by Adobe for some reason. It would be nice if it could work here too.