Clipboard

A fast, keyboard-driven clipboard history for Linux.

A small standalone desktop app that quietly tracks everything you copy — text and images — and lets you search and paste your history through a Raycast-style overlay summoned by a custom keyboard shortcut.

┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ ⌕  Search clipboard…                       4 items │
├──────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ 📌  git rebase -i HEAD~3                            │
│ 📌  https://tauri.app/v2/                           │
├──────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│  ¶  Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet…                     │
│  🖼  Image · 1920×1080 · 2.4 MB                      │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
   ↑↓ navigate   ↵ paste   Ctrl+P pin   Esc close

Built with Tauri 2, React 19, and SQLite. Runs as a single-instance daemon — bind any key combo in your desktop's keyboard settings; pressing it again toggles the existing window instead of spawning a duplicate.

Features

• Text + image capture — automatic, deduplicated by SHA-256.
• 50-item rolling history — pinned items are stored separately and never evicted.
• Fuzzy search across the whole history as you type.
• Keyboard-first — arrow keys to navigate, Enter to paste back, Ctrl+P to pin, Ctrl+⌫ to delete, Esc to dismiss.
• Privacy-respecting — everything stays in ~/.config/com.plxor.clipboard/. No network calls, ever.
• Single binary — ships as a self-contained AppImage that bundles GTK and WebKit so it runs on any modern Linux distro.

Install

Grab the AppImage from the latest release:

mkdir -p ~/Applications
mv ~/Downloads/Clipboard_*.AppImage ~/Applications/Clipboard.AppImage
chmod +x ~/Applications/Clipboard.AppImage

Then bind it to a keyboard shortcut:

Desktop	Where
GNOME	Settings → Keyboard → Custom Shortcuts → +; Command: ~/Applications/Clipboard.AppImage
KDE	System Settings → Shortcuts → Add Custom Shortcut → Command/URL
Sway/i3	bindsym $mod+v exec ~/Applications/Clipboard.AppImage
Hyprland	bind = SUPER, V, exec, ~/Applications/Clipboard.AppImage

The first press of the shortcut launches the daemon and shows the overlay. Subsequent presses toggle the overlay's visibility on the existing daemon — tauri-plugin-single-instance forwards the launch and the new process exits immediately.

Wayland users

Install wl-clipboard so the underlying clipboard library can read the Wayland selection:

sudo dnf install wl-clipboard       # Fedora
sudo apt install wl-clipboard       # Debian / Ubuntu
sudo pacman -S wl-clipboard         # Arch

Usage

Key	Action
↑ ↓	Navigate
↵	Paste back & hide
Ctrl+P	Toggle pin
Ctrl+⌫	Delete entry
Esc	Hide overlay

After pressing ↵, the selected entry is on your system clipboard — paste it normally with Ctrl+V in your target app.

Build from source

Prerequisites

# Runtime
sudo dnf install wl-clipboard

# Build toolchain
sudo dnf install gtk3-devel webkit2gtk4.1-devel librsvg2-devel @development-tools

# Rust + Bun
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh
curl -fsSL https://bun.sh/install | bash

Build

git clone https://github.com/BraveRam/clipboard.git
cd clipboard
bun install
NO_STRIP=1 bun run tauri build --bundles appimage

NO_STRIP=1 is needed on Fedora 40+ because the strip bundled inside linuxdeploy doesn't recognize the newer SHT_RELR relocation type used by recent toolchains. The flag tells linuxdeploy to skip the strip pass.

Output: src-tauri/target/release/bundle/appimage/Clipboard_*.AppImage.

For day-to-day development:

bun run tauri dev          # hot-reload frontend + auto-rebuild Rust on change
cargo test --manifest-path src-tauri/Cargo.toml     # repository tests

Architecture

                         OS-level keyboard shortcut
                                   │
                                   ▼
                  ┌────────────────────────────────────┐
                  │   tauri-plugin-single-instance      │
                  │   first launch  → start daemon      │
                  │   later launches → toggle window    │
                  └─────────────┬──────────────────────┘
                                │
              ┌─────────────────┴─────────────────┐
              ▼                                   ▼
   ┌──────────────────────┐         ┌──────────────────────────┐
   │ Rust core (Tauri 2)  │ events  │ React overlay (webview)  │
   │ ├─ arboard watcher   ├────────►│ ├─ SearchBar              │
   │ │   thread, 500 ms   │         │ ├─ EntryList              │
   │ ├─ rusqlite repo     │◄────────┤ └─ Keyboard navigation    │
   │ │   cap 50 unpinned  │ invoke  │                           │
   │ ├─ image thumbs      │         │                           │
   │ └─ Tauri commands    │         │                           │
   └──────────┬───────────┘         └──────────────────────────┘
              │
              ▼
   ~/.config/com.plxor.clipboard/
   ├── clipboard.db        SQLite (WAL)
   └── images/{sha256}.png Full-resolution captures

A polling thread in Rust uses arboard to read the system clipboard every 500 ms. Each change is hashed (SHA-256), deduplicated against the existing DB row, and persisted. Images are also written to disk as PNG and a 320-px-wide thumbnail is embedded as a BLOB for fast list rendering.

A WriteGuard records the hash of clipboard contents whenever the app writes (paste-back action), so the very next poll cycle doesn't re-capture our own write as a new entry.

Configuration

Currently zero — the app is intentionally opinionated. The cap (HISTORY_CAP = 50), poll interval, hotkey for pin/delete, and window size are constants in src-tauri/src/db.rs, src-tauri/src/clipboard.rs, src/hooks/useKeyboardNav.ts, and src-tauri/tauri.conf.json respectively. PRs welcome to surface these in a settings panel.

Data location

~/.config/com.plxor.clipboard/

To reset history:

rm -r ~/.config/com.plxor.clipboard

Contributing

Issues and PRs welcome. A few ground rules:

• Keep dependencies lean — this is a daemon, not a framework.
• Tests for any new repository logic (see src-tauri/src/db.rs#tests).
• cargo fmt + cargo clippy --all-targets -- -D warnings before pushing.
• Frontend: bun run build must pass clean.

This one is a single AppImage that you drop in ~/Applications/, bind to a key, and forget.

License

MIT