README.md

wl-clipboard: Wayland clipboard utilities

This project implements two little Wayland clipboard utilities, wl-copy and wl-paste, that let you easily copy data between the clipboard and Unix pipes, sockets, files and so on.

Usage is as simple as:

# copy a simple text message
$ wl-copy Hello world!

# copy the list of files in Downloads
$ ls ~/Downloads | wl-copy

# copy an image file
$ wl-copy < ~/Pictures/photo.png

# paste to a file
$ wl-paste > clipboard.txt

# grep each pasted word in file source.c
$ for word in $(wl-paste); do grep $word source.c; done

# copy the previous command
$ wl-copy "!!"

# replace the current selection with the list of types it's offered in
$ wl-paste --list-types | wl-copy

Although wl-copy and wl-paste are particularly optimized for plain text and other textual content formats, they fully support content of arbitrary MIME types. wl-copy automatically infers the type of the copied content by running xdg-mime(1) on it. wl-paste tries its best to pick a type to paste based on the list of offered MIME types and the extension of the file it's pasting into. If you're not satisfied with the type they pick or don't want to rely on this implicit type inference, you can explicitly specify the type to use with the --type option.

Options

For wl-copy:

• -o, --paste-once Only serve one paste request and then exit. Unless a clipboard manager specifically designed to prevent this is in use, this has the effect of clearing the clipboard after the first paste, which is useful for copying sensitive data such as passwords. Note that this may break pasting into some clients, in particular pasting into XWayland windows is known to break when this option is used.
• -f, --foreground By default, wl-copy forks and serves data requests in the background; this option overrides that behavior, causing wl-copy to run in the foreground.
• -c, --clear Instead of copying anything, clear the clipboard so that nothing is copied.

For wl-paste:

• -n, -no-newline Do not append a newline character after the pasted clipboard content. This option is automatically enabled for non-text content types.
• -l, --list-types Instead of pasting the selection, output the list of MIME types it is offered in.

For both:

• -p, --primary Use the "primary" clipboard instead of the regular clipboard. This uses the private GTK+ primary selection protocol. See the GNOME Wiki page on primary selection under Wayland for more details.
• -t mime/type, --type mime/type Override the inferred MIME type for the content. For wl-copy this option controls which type wl-copy will offer the content as. For wl-paste it controls which of the offered types wl-paste will request the content in. In addition to specific MIME types such as image/png, wl-paste also accepts generic type names such as text and image which make it automatically pick some offered MIME type that matches the given generic name.

Building

wl-clipboard is a simple Meson project, so building it is just:

# clone
$ git clone https://github.com/bugaevc/wl-clipboard.git
$ cd wl-clipboard

# build
$ meson build
$ cd build
$ ninja

# install
$ sudo ninja install

wl-clipboard only supports Linux (though patches to add BSD support are welcome!). The only manadatory dependency is the wayland-client library (try package named wayland-devel or libwayland-dev).

Optional dependencies for building:

• wayland-scanner for primary selection support using the bundled gtk-primary-selection protocol
• wayland-protocols (version 1.12 or later) for xdg-shell support (otherwise it won't run under compositors lacking wl_shell support, see the issue #2)

Optional dependencies for running:

• xdg-mime for content type inference in wl-copy (try package named xdg-utils)
• /etc/mime.types file for type inference in wl-paste (try package named mime-support or mailcap)

License

wl-clipboard is free software, available under the GNU General Public License version 3 or later.