Clipboard: Simple Unified Linux Clipping Tool

Key Takeaways

there are countless clipboard tools out there some of them are fairly simple like wo clipboard and x-clip some of them have a GUI interface like copy queue but over the past couple of months I've been seeing one particular project constantly showing up in my feed the dev is trying to make sure that absolutely everybody knows it exists and every time some sort of update happens to the project this is a project called clipboard and somehow it has an Aur package with that name I don't know how there wasn't already a project called clipboard now the general idea is simple it's supposed to unify copy cutting and pasting into a seamless workflow along with adding in some nice little additions now when you actually want to use the command in Prior versions you could write out the full word clipboard currently this is still going to work but it is deprecated with plans to removal next version so from now on what you should be writing out is just CB so the basic operations work as you may expect let's go and copy something this is done with the copy command now when we are copying things when we are pasting things when we're doing basically anything with the application it doesn't matter if we're working with files folders text we are using the exact same commands there's not a separate file command a separate text command or anything like that let's say I want to go and copy this Untitled PNG all I do is just pass in the name we can also list out multiple things at once I could list out multiple of this file I could mix and match between files and folders or anything like that and if we want to go and copy text instead all we do is just pass in a text string now when we are copying text we do have the option of piping text in as well so I could go you know pipe in hello and then that is going to copy it now the cut command is interacted with in the exact same way the only difference is when you are cutting text it's obviously not cutting it from anywhere so for text it acts exactly the same as a copy but if we are cutting a file like that Untitled PNG it is going to cut the item and that item if we go and check now I can't spell is going to be there until we paste it let's go and paste it somewhere like my pictures directory so if we go and do CB paste that file has now been pasted if we go and check in here there should be an Untitled PNG and if we go back to our home directory Untitled it is no longer here now when you are pasting text you are generally going to want to redirect that into a file let's say text.txt but if you don't redirect it it is still going to be pasted to a file just not a file that you made yourself this is going to be a default file called raw data dot clipboard so this one right here and it's going to contain whatever content you had in that clipboard generally it is going to be a better idea to redirect somewhere but just know it is still going to work on that note if you do paste something and there's already a file there with a matching name it's going to prompt you for what you want to do in this case I'm just going to say Skip and we're going to go to the next thing so far we have just been scratching the surface everything we've done has been with clipboards zero this is the same as your general system clipboard if I go and do CB copy add in this random text here and then we go and run CB show this is going to show us the contents in clipboard zero if I then go and say copy a file I have over here and we run the exact same thing again now that file is there instead but there are other clipboards we can work with and the way we do that is just appending a number for the clipboard we want to use let's do CB copy and let's say clipboard number three and then pass in some text if we now do CB show that is going to show the content of clipboard zero but if instead we do CB show three now it shows that contents if you want to see the contents of every clipboard what you can do is run CB by itself now this style of interaction is consistent across basically every command so if I want to go and say paste something from clipboard three I would go CB paste three if I want to do it for clipboard five that would be five clipboard seven so on and so forth the exact same thing with cut the exact same thing with copy the exact same thing with show it is a very consistent method of handling these clipboards now you might be thinking how many clipboards are there well there's not an arbitrary limit of five ten anything like that let's go and do CB copy and let's say I don't know 69 69 69 69 and then pass in haha uh funny number and that worked now if we do CB as we can see we have content in 0 3 and 69 69 69 69 at least from my testing it doesn't seem like there's any real limit on the number of clipboards you can have now there is a limit and the number that would actually be practical to use but that's a whole separate problem if you have some reason why you need such a ridiculous number of clipboards the option is absolutely going to be there now these clipboards are just regular clipboards that are going to disappear when you reboot your system your other option is to use a persistent clipboard and these do have a nice feature about them as well let's say you want to go and copy into persistent clipboard number one we add an underscore and then one let's go and do I know some random text here if we go CB as we can see it's in persistent clipboard one and it even meant mentions it with a p here the other difference we have is we can actually have named clipboards let's say this is the random uh text clipboard that copies with that name there CB as we can see random text with the regular clipboards you are not able to have named clipboards so if I do CB copy again and then add in some random letters here this is not going to work it's going to say the command doesn't exist now especially when dealing with these numbered clipboards it can get kind of confusing what each clipboard is supposed to be for one way you can address this is attaching a note this is basically a little descriptor telling you what the clipboard actually does once again if you want to give it to number zero don't have to give a number number three give it three so on and so forth and the same with the persistent clipboards just use that persistent clipboard name I'm gonna do it on clipboard three let's say this is the junk clipboard now that has a note attached and we can check that note with CB info and then the number and here it tells us all the information it tells us the clipboard name where that clipboard is stored whether it is persistent the amount of data in it whether it is locked or not which I don't believe is something actually implemented yet I at least couldn't find an option on how to lock it and then also the note attached now if we go and check one that doesn't have a note it's just gonna say there is no note here another neat thing we can do is load in additional data to a clipboard without removing the content already contained with it let's say I copy this Untitled PNG again and I realize wait maybe I needed something else in that clipboard as well what we can do is CB add and then add in some other file let's say uh this one right here if we do CV now we can see there are multiple things in that clipboard even though we just started with one the same can also be done in Reverse with the remove command this can be done in two separate ways either we can remove a very specific thing like the Untitled file and then if we go right here that file is now gone or we can do a regex this one is going to be on clipboard two this time and let's say I want to remove anything e onwards if we go and check this now all that is left here is the H another thing we can do is rather than manually copying the data between multiple clipboards we can actually just copy the clip copy the clipboard directly over I'm not redoing that take what we can do is CB load and then let's say I want to copy the content of zero for example so we're going to include no number into clipboard I don't know two and three if we go and do that and then run CB now that data is copied over and when you're done with everything the last thing you want to do is clear all the clipboards this can be done with CB clear now this does require a number there is currently no way to automatically clear everything this would be very nice to see and hopefully comes in a future version now we can see all of that data is now gone that's pretty much everything you can do now the GitHub does include a bunch of extra information about different options different ways you can write out the commands an example of of like how you can use this in a practical setting how you can use this with scripting things like that how you configure the application done primarily through environment variables but there are a couple of options available as well but most this stuff is pretty straightforward and one of the things the application does really well at least in the online documentation is document it really well so it's pretty easy to understand what's going on and the rest of it should be straightforward I've known about this project for probably a good couple of months I think I first heard about it back when it first started actually but I did try it back then the issue is it was very buggy back then so I didn't really feel like doing a video and I don't think it was gonna really do it justice and waiting a few months it seems like it's coming together pretty well for a lot of people maybe this is overkill maybe something like WL clipboard or x-clip does everything you need but if you want something a bit more powerful but you can still interact with it from your terminal maybe clipboard is worth looking at so let me know thoughts in the comment section down below do you use any sort of clipboard Manager application clipboard interaction tool or do you just copy and paste things and not really care what's going on in the background I would love to know so if you like this video go and like the video and if you really liked the video and you want to become one over these amazing people over here check out the patreon scrubs delibera pay Linked In the description down below that's gonna be it for me and clippy is great don't hate on Clippy [Music] [Applause] foreign [Music]