I've got no idea why this isn't working.

But if I find code someone has shared on a forum, I select all the code, and copy it.

I then open PD, go to edit then paste. And nothing happens!

What's the obvious part I'm missing here?

@toddak Hi, I think if someone is posting code that looks like this

#N canvas 0 22 450 300 10;
#X msg 159 93 hello;
#X obj 159 115 print;
#X connect 0 0 1 0;

This is what a Pd patch looks like if you open it with a text editor. You need to copy and paste it into a text editor (as plain text), save it with *.pd extension and then you will be able to open the file with Pd.

Ah, yes that is obvious now. Many many thanks!

In Pd-l2ork/Purr Data you can paste it into a canvas window and the corresponding objects will get created.

In Purr Data there's a "Paste from Clipboard" option with a shortcut that achieves this. We did that to keep the user from accidentally pasting a bunch of random data and evaluating it in the Pd interpreter.

Even if you're pasting into a text file and opening it in Pd, if you happen to paste extra content-- say, the paragraphs preceding and/or following a piece of Pd source file-- all that extra text will get evaluated as Pd messages. For example, the text "Hey everybody, here's that Pd snippet I told ya about," would get interpreted as two messages to be sent to the "Hey" receive symbol. It's possible to get a corrupted patch or a crash that way.

It seems weird, that this hasn't been implemented in Vanilla even in 2023. Maybe we should all flood the Github page with a feature request again?

Work is underway on vanilla https://github.com/pure-data/pure-data/pull/2086

@eeropic Good to see! I've been missing this too, it's kind of annoying that you lose your clipboard content when you restart Pd. And it's nice that purr/plug/pure-data will soon all do this, makes it easier to share parts of patches on a forum, or copy/paste between pd flavours.