Terminal copy and paste

Clipboard

On the desktop, the clipboard is entirely taken for granted. Many of us now use Ctrl+C in one application and Ctrl+V in another to copy text from one place to the next without even thinking about it. Those commands, along with Ctrl+X to cut, have been consigned to muscle memory. But it's not quite so simple on the command line. Historically, the command line didn't need this kind of copy and paste functionality because it was already purpose built for manipulating streams of data. Real hackers were supposed to pipe and filter output between commands rather than crudely copy and paste without automation. Ever since desktops arrived, and terminals moved from teletypes to windows, the two have coexisted with very little option for interaction, a situation made even worse when you're connected remotely. The mouse's handy drag-and-select, along with middle-mouse-button paste, has helped bridge the gap, as have tools such as xclip for copying output to the desktop clipboard, but there's still been very little modern innovation, and that's something Clipboard is hoping to provide.

At the heart of its functionality is the clipboard command, which can also be abbreviated to cp. It's remarkably straightforward to use. You simply run the command directly or wrap other commands around it. Type cb copy README, for example, and the contents of the README file will be copied to an internal clipboard. Adding a number to the end of the command will use that numbered clipboard instead. Typing cb paste will output the clipboard contents to the same or a different file, which you can select from a prompt, and the show command will display the contents of all your clipboards. Environment variables can be set to remove all prompting and also to create a persistent directory for clipboards, which is useful if you want to share them with a remote session. Best of all, it interacts directly with the X11 clipboard with no further configuration, and Wayland support is coming.

Project Website

https://github.com/Slackadays/Clipboard

Clipboard can copy and paste across two systems using the SSHFS utility and a shared directory location.

Command runner