cliphist
clipboard history βmanagerβ for wayland
- write clipboard changes to a history file
- recall history with dmenu / rofi / wofi (or whatever other picker you like)
- both text and images are supported
- clipboard is preserved byte-for-byte
- leading / trailing whitespace / no whitespace or newlines are preserved
- wonβt break fancy editor selections like vim wordwise, linewise, block mode
- no concept of a picker, only pipes
requires: go, wl-clipboard, xdg-utils (for image mime inferance)
install
- you could try using your distro's repos if it's available there
- or stick a static binary from the releases page somewhere in your
$PATH - or just install it from source with go and
$ go install go.senan.xyz/cliphist@latest
usage
listen for clipboard changes
$ wl-paste --watch cliphist store
this will listen for changes on your primary keyboard and write it to
the history.
call it once per session - for example in your sway config
select old item
$ cliphist list | dmenu | cliphist decode | wl-copy
bind it to something nice on your keyboard
delete old item
$ cliphist list | dmenu | cliphist delete
or else query manually
$ cliphist delete-query "secret item"
clear database
$ cliphist wipe
picker examples
dmenu
cliphist list | dmenu | cliphist decode | wl-copy
fzf
cliphist list | fzf | cliphist decode | wl-copy
rofi
rofi -modi clipboard:/path/to/cliphist-rofi -show clipboard with contrib/cliphist-rofi
rofi dmenu mode
cliphist list | rofi -dmenu | cliphist decode | wl-copy
faq
why do i have numbers in my picker? can i get rid of them?
it's important that a line prefixed with a number is piped into cliphist decode. this number is used to lookup in the database the exact original selection that you made, with all leading, trailing, non printable etc whitespace presevered. none of that will not be shown in the preview output of cliphist list
since the format of cliphist list is "<id>\t<100 char preview>", and most pickers consider "\t" to be column seperator, you can try to just select column number 2
# fzf
cliphist list | fzf -d $'\t' --with-nth 2 | cliphist decode | wl-copy# rofi
cliphist list | rofi -dmenu -display-columns 2 | cliphist decode | wl-copy# wofi
# it kind of works but breaks with quotes in the original selection. i recommend not trying to hide the column with wofi
cliphist list | wofi --dmenu --pre-display-cmd "echo '%s' | cut -f 2" | cliphist decode | wl-copyhow do i narrow down the items that are copied to cliphist, or always copy images from my browser?
it's also possible to run wl-paste --watch several times for multiple mime types
for example in your window manager's startup you could run
wl-paste --type text --watch cliphist store
wl-paste --type image --watch cliphist store
now you should have text and raw image data available in your history. make sure you have xdg-utils installed too
