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)
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: other stuff: .
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?
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)
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.
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
My go-to method is setting a BTT gesture to call it. The 2 finger tip-tap gesture (one finger down on trackpad, then tap with your other finger) feels totally natural
The other thing I should have suggested in my previous reply is to set a Keyboard Shortcut in PopClip (I use ⌃⌘P personally) which will get it to show up at times when it doesn’t do so automatically.
(You may be wondering why it can’t show up automatically always; PopClip has to use several heuristics to tell whether any particular mouse gesture/click/drag intended to select text or was just, say, moving a window, dragging something or double clicking some other thing. So it uses these rules to say when it will and won’t show up. You’ll find if it does show up when it shouldn’t it can also be really annoying - and I also get a lot more complaints that way round - so it’s about finding the right balance.)
arrow: 
other stuff: 
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