yory8 / clipman

A simple clipboard manager for Wayland

ARCHIVED

Github is forcing me to move to 2FA, and I can't be bothered to find out how it's done, nor do I wish to. As I've stopped using a clipboard manager for a while, I have decided to archive this repository rather than move to a decent host. I recommend making your own clone because I'll fully delete my account in the near future.

Clipman is a finished program: it works, and doesn't need maintenance. It is also very simple and tiny, in fact I should have used python or even just bash. It has some fundamental design flaws that might warrant exploring a redo from scratch, though the big issues still lack a satisfying solution at the wayland protocol level. Any interested party will find abundant documentation about it scattered throughout the issue tracker.

Clipman

A basic clipboard manager for Wayland, with support for persisting copy buffers after an application exits.

Bugs

When you experience a clipboard-related bug, try to see if it still happens without clipman running, as it's more likely to be caused by one of our own known issues rather than wl-clipboard.

Installing

From source

Requirements:

• a windows manager that uses wlr-data-control, like Sway and other wlroots-based WMs.
• wl-clipboard >= 2.0
• a selector: wofi and bemenu are specially supported, but you can use what you want
• notify-send (optional, for desktop notifications)

Install go, add $GOPATH/bin to your path, then run go get github.com/yory8/clipman OR run go install inside this folder.

Distros

A few distros ship with clipman binaries in their official or unofficial repos.

Usage

Run the binary in your Sway session by adding exec wl-paste -t text --watch clipman store (or exec wl-paste -t text --watch clipman store 1>> PATH/TO/LOGFILE 2>&1 & to log errors) at the beginning of your config. It is highly recommended that you run clipman with the --no-persist option, see Known Issues.

For primary clipboard support, also add exec wl-paste -p -t text --watch clipman store -P --histpath="~/.local/share/clipman-primary.json" (note that both the -p in wl-paste and the -P in clipman are mandatory in this case).

To query the history and select items, run the binary as clipman pick -t wofi. You can assign it to a keybinding: bindsym $mod+h exec clipman pick -t wofi. You can pass additional arguments to the selector like this: clipman pick --tool wofi -T'--prompt=my-prompt -i' (both --prompt and -i are flags of wofi). You can use a custom selector like this: clipman pick --print0 --tool=CUSTOM --tool-args="fzf --prompt 'pick > ' --bind 'tab:up' --cycle --read0".

To remove items from history, clipman clear -t wofi and clipman clear --all.

To serve the last history item at startup, add exec clipman restore to your Sway config.

For more options: clipman -h.

Known Issues

We only support plain text. By default, we continue serving the last copied item even after its owner has exited. This means that, unless you run with the --no-persist option, you'll always immediately lose rich content; for example:

• vim's visual block mode breaks
• copying images in Firefox breaks
• if you copy a bookmark in Firefox, you won't be able to paste it in another bookmark folder
• if you copy formatted text inside Libre Office you'll lose all formatting on paste

Run clipman store with the --no-persist option if you are affected. Unfortunately, it seems that there is no way to make them play well together.

Status

Supporting images or fixing the known issues would require a complete rewrite using wlroots directly. Clipman is considered feature complete and is now in maintanance mode.

Related software

• Clipmon: a demon specialized in keeping the clipboard alive after an application quits; if that's your only reason for using a clipboard manager, it might be a better fit as it supports any filetype (not just text).

License

GPL v3.0

2019- (C) yory8 [e-mail]