Show HN: Clyp – Clipboard Manager for Linux

18 hours ago (github.com)

One thing that I love about Windows (and there aren't many others) is that pressing Super+V (instead of Ctrl+V) shows a list of last N clipboard entries and you can select which one you wish to paste. Simple and very effective.

You can also pin some entries so that they are permanently available, but that's a bonus.

I haven't seen a clipboard manager behave like that in Linux - can this one be used in a similar way?

  • KDE's default clipboard manager lets you summon a list (and you can change what shortcut to invoke it and do things like use a shortcut to move to the next clipboard entry) and edit entries. It doesn't let you pin them though, I think.

  • I’ve used ditto for this since before windows gained this capability. It also has an ignore list (e.g. keepass lives there) and a few other niceties which make it one of the first tools I install on a windows box (not very often anymore, granted).

  • I use a popup like that myself a lot. Clipman on xfce supports that but no pinning.

  • I'm using Gnome. On Gnome, you could just install "Clipboard Indicator" or something like this in Gnome Extension and set shortcut as "Super+V". It's pretty easy, I think.

  • Yup as others have said, super+v for me invokes greenclip's rofi plugin which gives me a nice themable clipboard history overlay.

I thought wayland had some restrictions on global clipboard access and the last time I tried none of the well known clipboard managers worked as expected. (Also they all looked like shit).

This has been one of my pain points switching from macOS to linux or windows. Great job.

  • I actually went looking at the source code to see if this would work on Wayland and it doesn't. The clipboard snooping is implemented by listening for events using gdk.Clipboard, which is not an ext_data_control_v1 implementation. So on Wayland it'll only notice clipboard events if it's in focus (or if the compositor sends clipboard events to unfocused windows, which I'm not sure any do).

    https://github.com/murat-cileli/clyp/blob/2c0ce6c33813c3f35f...

    Edit: Yes, tested it now and it doesn't detect clipboard events from Wayland windows when it doesn't have focus. It only detects events from Xwayland windows when unfocused, or if I copy something from a Wayland window and then focus the clyp window then it detects the thing I copied.

  • That's interesting.. Never ran into this, been using various clipboard managers in wayland (swaywm at first, now niri) for years without issue. copyq is what I use these days and, while not quite as pretty as this one, its great!

Linux clipboards have been a pain point to me for decades. What I really want is a single unified clipboard daemon that works across different login sessions and covers console and graphical environments with the same keyboard shortcut. Bonus points if it's got a single-use-paste option for passwords, and also buffers to hold onto multiple selections.

  • > a single-use-paste option for passwords

    This wouldn't prevent the malware that's constantly scanning the clipboard from stealing your password; it would only prevent you from using it after it's been stolen.

  • For clarity, are you expecting a clipboard in full terminal sessions (including serial?) or are you just meaning pty sessions with a terminal emulator?

    I'm not sure how a clipboard manager would know the text copied in was a password (or 2fa).

I use CopyQ. Love it because it's so cross-platform, and consistently works across my Mac and Linux machines with minimal fuss; it handles images really well too.

Great work! does the CLI support clipboard operations like MacOS' `pbcopy` and `pbpaste` ? I've added it to my stars to keep and eye on the project, GTK4 and wayland support makes it rather futureproof IMO

  • There's wl-clipboard for this, has wl-copy and wl-paste commands. I've been using it on sway for years.

  • For Wayland I just use this:

            alias pbcopy='xsel --clipboard --input'
            alias pbpaste='xsel --clipboard --output'
    
    

    I used to do the same thing on Xorg with xclip I think

    Switching between macOS for job and linux for everything else, I’ve honestly never realized any difference.

    • I'm confused; xsel, as you might imagine from the name, is very specifically a program for manipulating the X11 selection and clipboard. So it does work on Xorg, but I'm very confused that it would work in any meaningful capacity on Wayland. Are you somehow using Xwayland?

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  • It would be nice if you could pipe to it like pbcopy, with each invocation creating a new entry, and add support for automatically expiring old entries.

These clipboards are a privacy problem when you're sharing your screen. So many times a coworker has copy/pasted and a dialog with even passwords have been shown on screen...