Shell aliases to make clipboard use easier.
Working with the X Windows clipboard from the terminal is a bit of a pain. You either have to select text to copy and middle click to paste, or select text and use a keyboard shortcut (which is never the usual Ctrl-C for copy, because that's the key combo to kill whatever you're doing).
I created some shell aliases to fix this:
yycopies something to the clipboardpppastes the clipboard contentsgcppexecutesgit clone <clipboard contents>
The key combinations are based on copy ('yank') and paste commands from the vi(m) editor
First up, you'll need to have xclip installed. On Ubuntu you can do this by running:
apt-get install xclip
Then just copy the contents of aliases to your .bashrc or the relevant file for whichever shell you use.
- For now this only works with X Windows, not Wayland. Though you could just install wl-clipboard and write your own aliases for that.
- I've tested it with Bash and ZSH. I assume it should work for other shells too since it's dead simple
Don't actually type the $ sign. That's just to show you should be typing this at a terminal
$ yy file.txt
Copies the contents of file.txt to the clipboard
$ echo "hello world!"
Copies the string "hello world" to the clipboard
$ ls | yy
Copies the output of ls to the clipboard
$ pp
Outputs the string to the console
backtick pp backtick
Github doesn't like me using backticks (i.e. the key below escape and above tab on many keyboards) in code blocks, so excuse the formatting.
Wrap the pp command in backticks to execute the command stored in the clipboard
$ pp > file.txt
Creates file.txt with contents of the clipboard
$ pp >> file.txt
Appends clipboard contents to file.txt
$ gcpp
Clones a git repository that has its URL stored in the clipboard