Yanking and pasting to system clipboard not working under Wayland

[Provisional9448]

I'm trying to copy/paste between Helix and other apps, but I get an error clipboard provider wl-copy failed when using space+y or :clipboard-yank. Copying and pasting works fine if I run sudo hx.

I think it might have something to do with wl-copy and wl-paste and how my environment variables are set up. I did check that wl-copy and wl-paste are in my $PATH. which wl-copy results in /usr/local/bin/wl-copy.

When I run wl-copy hello world!, I get an error Missing a shell. And when I run sudo wl-copy hello world!, I get an error:

error: XDG_RUNTIME_DIR is invalid or not set in the environment.
Failed to connect to a Wayland server

Is this just a Wayland issue or is there something I can do to fix this?

Thanks!

Edit: I just found out that hx --health clipboard returns System clipboard provider: wl-paste+wl-copy but running it as sudo I get System clipboard provider: xsel.

Why is the sudo system clipboard using xsel when I'm on Wayland?

[pascalkuthe]

It's hard to tell what is wrong here but this is not a helix specific issue. The clipboard providers are clearly not working so something with your setup is wrong.

If xsel is working for you it actually sounds like you are using x-org and not wayland tough.

[Provisional9448]

I am definitely using Wayland, because in the About section in settings it says Wayland. If I inspect windows using alt+F2 and type lg to open Gnome Looking Glass, I can see my windows are in MetaWindowWayland.

I did find someone with a similar issue with Neovim posted on the wl-clipboard repo.

This is probably because sudo messes with the environment, so you end up with XDG_RUNTIME_DIR unset. It should fail like this:

$ sudo wl-paste 
error: XDG_RUNTIME_DIR not set in the environment.
Failed to connect to a Wayland server

Try using sudo -E to keep the environment.

It seems like this may be an intended functionality of how copy and paste works in Wayland. As of right now, I'll temporarily run hx as sudo hx so the clipboard will work.

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Edit: For some reason xsel is working while wl-clipboard is not. I have confirmed that I am, in fact, using Wayland. Is there a way to set xsel as the system clipboard provider for hx?

[Provisional9448]

Okay, I have got it working now. The reason why wl-copy and wl-paste were not working is because I had two versions on my system, likely from a prior build.

If anyone comes across the same problem, have them verify that wl-copy and wl-paste are in both the /usr/local/bin and /usr/bin directories. Remove the ones from /usr/local/bin in order to default to the /usr/bin version from the distro's repo.

This is where I found the solution:
bugaevc/wl-clipboard#181 (comment)