Clipboard

This article or section needs expansion.

Reason: Describe clipboards for Wayland and XWayland. Some references: [1], [2], [3]. (Discuss in Talk:Clipboard)

According to Wikipedia:

The clipboard is a facility used for short-term data storage and/or data transfer between documents or applications, via copy and paste operations.

History

In X10, cut buffers were introduced. These were limited buffers that stored arbitrary text and were used by most applications. However, they were inefficient and implementation of them varied, so selections were introduced. Cut buffers are long deprecated, and although some applications (such as xterm) may have legacy support for them, it is both not likely and not recommended that they be used.

Selections

Freedesktop.org describes the two main selections as follows:[4]

PRIMARY: Used for the currently selected text, even if it is not explicitly copied, and for middle-mouse-click pasting. In some cases, pasting is also possible with a keyboard shortcut.
CLIPBOARD: Used for explicit copy/paste commands involving keyboard shortcuts or menu items. Hence, it behaves like the single-clipboard system on Windows. Unlike PRIMARY, it can also handle multiple data formats.

The majority of programs for Xorg, including Qt and GTK applications, follow this behavior. While ICCCM also defines a SECONDARY selection, it does not have a consensually agreed upon purpose. Despite the naming, all three selections are basically "clipboards". Rather than the old "cut buffers" system where arbitrary applications could modify data stored in the cut buffers, only one application may control or "own" a selection at one time. This prevents inconsistencies in the operation of the selections.

See the Keyboard shortcuts page which lists the default shortcuts in many programs.

It is also important to realize that according to the selection protocols, nothing is copied until it is pasted. For example, if you select some word in a terminal window, close the terminal and then want to paste it somewhere else, it will not work because the terminal is gone and the text has not been copied anywhere. If you want the word to be preserved after closing terminal window, consider installing a clipboard manager.

Note: Clipboard managers can significantly change the user experience, for example they might synchronize the PRIMARY and CLIPBOARD selections to emulate a single-clipboard system.

Tools

This section lists command-line tools to manipulate the clipboards.

sselp — Simple X selection printer. Prints the X selection to stdout.

https://tools.suckless.org/x/sselp || sselp^AUR

xclip — A lightweight, command-line based interface to the clipboard.

https://github.com/astrand/xclip || xclip

xsel — Command-line program for getting and setting the contents of the X selection.

http://www.vergenet.net/~conrad/software/xsel/ || xsel

wl-clipboard — A simple copy/paste tool for Wayland compositors.

https://github.com/bugaevc/wl-clipboard || wl-clipboard

Tip: Clipboards on Wayland can be synchronized with wl-clipboard using wl-paste -pw wl-copy.

Managers

This section lists clipboard managers which provide additional features such as clipboard history or synchronization.

Anamnesis — Clipboard manager that stores all the clipboard history and offers an interface to do a full-text search. It has both a command line and GUI mode available.

http://anamnesis.sourceforge.net/ || anamnesis^AUR

Autocutsel — Command line and daemon interfaces to synchronize PRIMARY, CLIPBOARD and cut buffer selections.

https://www.nongnu.org/autocutsel/ || autocutsel

Clipboard Indicator — Clipboard manager extension for GNOME Shell. Adds a clipboard indicator to the top panel, and caches clipboard history.

https://github.com/Tudmotu/gnome-shell-extension-clipboard-indicator || gnome-shell-extension-clipboard-indicator-git^AUR

Clipcat — Clipboard manager written in Rust.

https://github.com/xrelkd/clipcat || clipcat^AUR

ClipIt — Fork of Parcellite. It has both a command line and GUI mode available.

https://github.com/CristianHenzel/ClipIt || clipit^AUR

Clipman — Clipboard manager plugin for the Xfce4 panel. It keeps the clipboard contents around while it is usually lost when you close an application. It is able to handle text and images, and has a feature to execute actions on specific text selections by matching them against regular expressions.

https://goodies.xfce.org/projects/panel-plugins/xfce4-clipman-plugin || xfce4-clipman-plugin

ClipManager — Cross-platform clipboard manager written in Python and Qt.

https://github.com/scottwernervt/clipmanager || clipmanager^AUR

Clipmenu — Dmenu based clipboard manager

https://github.com/cdown/clipmenu/ || clipmenu

Clipster — A lightweight, command-line-driven clipboard manager, written in Python.

https://github.com/mrichar1/clipster || clipster^AUR, clipster-git^AUR

CopyQ — Clever Qt clipboard manager with searchable and editable history, custom actions on items and command line support.

https://github.com/hluk/CopyQ || copyq

Glipper — Clipboard manager for the GNOME desktop with many features and plugin support.

https://launchpad.net/glipper || glipper^AUR

GPaste — Clipboard management system that aims at being a new generation Parcellite, with a modular structure split in a couple of libraries and a daemon for adaptability. Offers a GNOME Shell extension and a CLI interface.

https://github.com/Keruspe/GPaste || gpaste