Mac no copy/paste

Mac no copy/paste: a reader asks…

Hi Chris, I can’t seem to copy and paste from browsers on my Mac. I tried Chrome and Safari. I’ve been trying to troubleshoot. I can copy and paste stuff from pages and from other programs, but when I try to copy a URL it doesn’t. Any tips?

It seems this is a rarely-occurring bug that affects a small group of users, and appears across a variety of versions of OS X. What appears to be happening is that your Mac’s ‘Pasteboard’ app is malfunctioning. This is similar to the Microsoft Windows’ Clipboard, a hidden place where you can copy things to and then paste them elsewhere.

My first piece of advice when dealing with any type of computer problem is to restart your computer, and my second piece of advice is to update your operating system and installed programs. Believe it or not, those two actions solve about 96% of all computer problems.

Assuming you’ve already done those two things, then you can open your Disk Utility app and run First Aid. That fully automated process will take care of any needed fixes within OS X, and you really can’t go wrong using it. The only bump in the road is if you try to run it and you get an error, in which case you’ll need to restart your Mac in recovery mode and run Disk Utility from there. But for almost everyone, First Aid works without a hitch.

One other thing you can try is a fix that some (but not all) others have said works to restore the full pasteboard functionality. What you do is kill the pasteboard process. It then automatically restarts and often unsticks the URL copy problem. Here’s how:

1. Open Finder to your Application Folder and open the Utilities subfolder, then run the Activity Monitor app. Alternatively, you can just click the magnifying glass (in your top menubar on the right) to search for ‘activity monitor’ and then run it.
2. in the Activity Monitor app’s search box, type ‘pboard’ and press Enter on your keyboard to search
3. In the results, there should only be one entry for the pboard process, so click on it once to select it and then click the grey X near the top-left of the window to kill the process. That’s not the red circle you normally close a window with, there’s another button just below that.

When this is done, the process will restart itself behind the scenes, and hopefully start working again for you. Give it a try and let me know in the comments if it works for you. I should add that you should restart your Mac immediately after you kill the process just to make sure you’ve got everything else closed correctly.

Lastly, there is a documented bug where trying to paste a URL from Chrome doesn’t work to the body of an email message. The workaround for that (since there’s no bug-fix yet) is to paste the URL into the subject line, and then copy that and paste it into the body of the email message.