Double-clicking a word (on a web page) doesn't activate Popclip

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#1

Hi all.
New to PopClip and still testing as well as working out some extensions use-cases.

I’ve noticed that on at least one web-page (happens to be THE most important webpage that I use for my business) PopClip doesn’t activate at all if I double-click a single word. It only activates if I click-and-drag-and-release over the word. All other webpages and apps seem to work fine with double-clicking… Any ideas why this might be and how I can address it?

Update: I can see in the PopClip debug log;

  • Excluded by initial (pre-axapi) policy check (probe+require-beam)

Thanks in advance

Dave

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#2

Hi Dave, welcome to the forum.
One quirk of how PopClip works is that it will amend its behavour according to the current pointer type: e.g. beam: arrow 00 ApjSCt com.microsoft.VSCode arrow: arrow 00 Bal5u- at.eggerapps.tabletool other stuff: arrow 00 _JFbG- com.apple.dt.Xcode arrow 00 _x1LOo build.bru.MacGladys.

When double-clicking, PopClip will only try to grab the text selection if the cursor was the text-editing beam (hence ‘require-beam’ rule in the log). If PopClip doesn’t do that check, then it can cause glitches in some apps when double clicking on non-text, or cause false triggers of PopClip.

So what seems to be happening here is that the website you are using is not setting the beam cursor when the mouse is hovering over text. (Or it might be a custom beam cursor which PopClip isn’t recognising.) Does that make sense with what you are seeing?

#3

Hi Nick,
That’s exactly what I am seeing. I noticed it myself by reading the console and observing the cursor change (or not).
Do you think we can do something that might be able to drop the requirement for the beam cursor when the frontmost app is Safari and the page matches a know URL (or RegEx matched URL)??

The page in question is a Shopify order admin page (there are probably other pages)

What do you think?

#4

There’s a whole internal configuration system in PopClip for this compatibility logic, so this is definitely the kind of thing that is doable, although it’s not user configurable at the moment. It also doesn’t currently work on URL-specific basis though, only a per-app basis.

Anyeway, I’ll gve it some thought…

#5

Sorry for mentioning work-around techniques.

In the occasional “when PopClip does not activate after selecting text” or “when the displayed portion of the PopClip disappears because the pointer was moved slightly after the PopClip was activated,” we explicitly call PopClip.

In my case, I use Alfred’s Workflow to call the following script with a double-tap of the shift key.

on alfred_script(q)
tell application “PopClip” to appear
end alfred_script

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