Clipsim

clipsim is a simple and fast X clipboard manager written in C. It retrives clipboard text when the window owning it is closed, and keeps a clipboard history. If an image is detected, it is saved in /tmp, and the respective filename is saved on history. The primary and secondary selection buffers are ignored. When copying text equal to some previous text, the history order is updated so that each entry is unique in the history. Additionally, clipsim can send a signal to a specific program when clipboard content changes, which is useful for updating a status bar, for example. See environment variables.

Usage

First, you need to start the daemon by running

$ clipsim --daemon

Start copying text into the X clipboard.

Then, when you want to print the history, run:

$ clipsim --print

Which will print the entire clipboard history, with entries separated by NULL. And with multiple white space supressed.

In order to select one of them, you can use fzf and xclip.

# Don't actually do this. The output from `clipsim --print` has all white spaced
# supressed in order to improve usage with fzf. See the next snippet on how to
# overcome this.
$ clipsim --print | fzf --read0 | xclip -selection clipboard

In order to retrieve the entry with original white space and remove the leading number:

#!/bin/sh

# usage: $0 [-c |-d]
# usage: $0 [--copy|--delete]

id="$(clipsim --print 2> /dev/null \
    | fzf --prompt="clipsim $1 " --reverse --read0 \
    | awk 'NR==1{print $1; exit}')"
[ -n "$id" ] && clipsim "$1" "$id"

Tip: use with a terminal emulator that opens quickly. My suggestion is urxvtc (be sure to have urxvtd running):

$ urxvtc -e clip.sh # clip.sh is the script above (see scripts/ for more)

If you know of some terminal emulator that opens faster than urxvtc, please let me know.

To explicity save the clipboard history in $XDG_CACHE_HOME/clipsim/history:

$ clipsim --save

In order to remove an specific entry from history:

$ clipsim --remove <N>

In order to print an specific entry from history:

$ clipsim --info <N>

Usage

$ clipsim --help
usage: clipsim COMMAND [n]
Available commands:
-p | --print  : print entire history, with trimmed whitespace
-i | --info   : print entry number <n>, with original whitespace
-c | --copy   : copy entry number <n>, with original whitespace
-r | --remove : remove entry number <n>
-s | --save   : save history to $XDG_CACHE_HOME/clipsim/history
-d | --daemon : spawn daemon (clipboard watcher and command listener
-h | --help   : print this help message

Images

Clipsim stores the images in /tmp, and clipsim --info will show them using stiv or chafa. When retrieving images from the history, xclip is used.

Instalation

AUR

$ yay -S clipsim-git

Manual

Make sure you have libxfixes, xclip and libmagic installed.

$ git clone https://codeberg.org/lucas.mior/clipsim.git clipsim
$ cd clipsim
$ make
$ sudo make install

Configuration

Edit clipsim.h and recompile.

Environment variables

$CLIPSIM_SIGNAL_NUMBER  -> which signal should be send to $CLIPSIM_SIGNAL_PROGRAM when clipboard content changes
$CLIPSIM_SIGNAL_PROGRAM -> which program should $CLIPSIM_SIGNAL_NUMBER be sent to when clipboard content changes
$CLIPSIM_IMAGE_PREVIEW  -> image preview program (defaults to chafa)
$XDG_CACHE_HOME         -> used for cache

Note: $CLIPSIM_SIGNAL_NUMBER should be a number between 1 and SIGRTMAX - SIGRTMIN. It is not interpreted directly, it is added to SIGRTMIN (do not add it yourself).

Bugs

Clipsim might have an weird behavior if you use it with applications that do not use UTF-8. Additionally, incremental buffer reading is not implemented, which means that if an application is to use that so called "feature", clipsim won't save that text to history.

Rationale

There are many other clipboard managers for X, however all of them are either too slow, not modular (enforce an usage method upon users) or don't recover clipboard when a window is closed.

Clipsim adresses this issues.