Copy and Paste into iOS Simulator

I’ve been developing iOS apps for six years and I just learned this today. Amazing… someday someone will figure out a better way to document all the things.

I was getting frustrated with copy and paste in the simulator and couldn’t figure out what was going on.

Results were similar to what you describe: copy and paste would sometimes paste the same value as I had copied before, but not what I just copied to the clipboard.

I finally realized that the simulator has it’s own clipboard, separate from the main OS X clipboard.

You use the touch-based copy and paste commands to paste into your application from the simulator clipboard.

You can use the standard OS X copy paste shortcuts (Command-X,C,V) to paste from the system clipboard into the simulator clipboard.

So to copy and paste from Chrome (for example), you select the text in Chrome, Command-C to copy. Then switch to the simulator, Command-V to paste into the simulator clipboard. Then in your application, you simulate a touch in the textfield to bring up the paste option, then simulate a touch to the paste button to paste the simulator clipboard contents into the app.

The menu options do the same thing as the keyboard shortcuts–copy/paste between the system clipboard and the simulator keyboard.

Now that I figured it out, I actually like it much better than if the simulator clipboard was automatically tied to the OS X clipboard.

-funroll