Xclip is not talking to the system clipboard (Klipper)

If anyone could help me out with this, I’d greatly appreciate it. Basically, I can’t ctrl + v to paste anything I pipe into the clipboard selection in xclip, and i can’t xclip -o anything I copied with ctrl-c or ctrl-shift-c.

Maybe I want to paste a path into a neovim file. echo $(pwd) | xclip -i -sel cNow the path is in my clipboard, right? It sure shows up if i xclip -o -sel c!

But when I go into neovim and paste from the unnamedplus register, instead it pastes the last thing I copied in my browser.

if I want to copy the output of something from my terminal and google it, ctrl+v in the browser completely ignores my xclip selection.

i am forced to use the mouse and ctrl+shift+c in order to paste it into a search engine, like a caveman.

I hope I’ve done a decent enough job explaining the problem. It was most apparent earlier, as I was making a cronjob and I had to be explicit about file paths because i couldn’t assume the working directory would be the directory of the script I was calling. I really wish I could have just echo $(pwd) | xclip -sel c; open neovim; hit p; see the path appear in my file.

I have a little clipboard icon in my system tray with my copy history, except none of the things I put in the clipboard selection with xclip -sel c or xsel -b appear there. I think that program is klipper, but I’m not sure.

I know there’s a number of work arounds but still this kind of frustrates me. I think it has something to do with wayland and xclipboard not talking to each other. I am running wayland, KDE Plasma 5.27.5, and Debian 12.

Is there a simple configuration setting I can tweak, or do I need to find something to replace klipper or xclip? I have tried toggling the keep selection and clipboard the same and always save text selection in history settings in the plasma clipboard, no change. I tried two terminal emulators to no avail.

I will happily provide any more information if it would be helpful.