Question

Drag and drop failing to clear drag clipboard on macOS

Forum|Forum|2 months ago
April 15, 2026
3 replies
87 views

I had thought to use drag and drop as a slightly safer alternative to copy/paste. I was under the impression that certain coding practices limit the time that credentials remain on the clipboard.

I use Apple's "Clipboard Viewer" to monitor the general clipboard and the drag clipboard. I notice that if I drag and drop from 1Password to BBEdit the drag clipboard is cleared after the drop. That is the expected behavior. If I drag to Firefox, Chrome, or Safari, the drag clipboard is not cleared.

If I cancel a drag and drop after the clearing has failed for some application, then the clipboard is not cleared. If I cancel a drag and drop after the clearing didn't fail for some application, then the clipboard is cleared.

As an aside, the 90 second timeout of clipboard content does clear the drag clipboard.

macOS

BazAuthor

Apologies - I neglected to report versions:

macOS - 26.4.1

1Password for Mac 8.12.10 (81210036)

1P_Dave

1Password Employee

Hello @Baz! 👋

Thank you for reporting this. When dragging and dropping a password from the 1Password app, the copy and paste clipboard isn't used. So that we can look into this further, are you able to share a screen recording showing you viewing the "drag clipboard" while dragging a password from 1Password to another app? This will help me to better understand the situation and reach out to the correct team internally.

If you'd like to avoid posting the screen recording to the public community then please email it to support@1Password.com along with a link to this thread. After emailing in, you'll receive an automated reply with a Support ID that looks something like [#ABC-12345-678]. Post that here, and I'll be able to locate your message.

-Dave

BazAuthor

Thanks Dave.

I use "Clipboard Viewer", which is part of "Additional Tools for Xcode 26.4", found at https://developer.apple.com/download/all/.

That viewer has the ability to show 5 different clipboards, selectable from the dropdown in the titlebar. My video clip has the "Drag Clipboard" selected. I did not include a demo of cancelled drags since I did not get consistent results. When recording cancelled drags never cleared the drag clipboard.

The video clip shows drags onto BBEdit first, followed by drags onto Brave browser. Nothing is left on the clipboard after the BBEdit drag. The password is left on the clipboard after the Brave browser drag.

The clip is a 3.7 MB QuickTime screen recording. Is there a way to upload it here to ensure it remains with the conversation, rather than in a temporary Dropbox link?

BazAuthor

I went ahead and emailed the clip. The automated response included two identifiers:

ticket ID 572959

and at the end of the message

[Z7ZM1P-P6PWP]

There was no identifier matching the pattern you said to look for.

1P_Gem

1Password Employee

Hi @Baz, thanks for letting us know! I can confirm that we've received your email, and one of my colleagues will send you a reply there as soon as possible.

BazAuthor

Thanks for letting me know.

When I use copy/paste for credentials, I just hit a button in the menubar that triggers "pbcopy < /dev/null". I prefer that over waiting the 90 seconds for the automatic clear. Unfortunately, that only clears the general clipboard but not the drag one. For now, I've just stopped using drag-and-drop.

I had another issue with drag-and-drop which I've had support for. When a drag is started, the 1Password window intentionally disappears. But, depending on the drop target, it sometimes doesn't reappear after the drop. Perhaps the current issue has the same underlying cause. 1Password might not be receiving the callback from certain applications so that it can execute finalizing behavior. Just a naive idea.

Sign up

1Password employees: Sign in with SSO

Login to the community

1Password employees: Sign in with SSO

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded