[RFC] Neoclip: multi-platform clipboard provider w/o extra dependencies

[matveyt]

This is a request for comments for my project Neoclip.

As we all know, Neovim had dropped all system-specific code to access clipboard. While it was a flexible design, but it led to several common problems the users seem to encounter all the time: need for extra utlities or specific GUIs; poor performance under some circumstances; unreliable detection of Visual-Blocks and such. There were some attempts to resolve this problem, like this or this, but none is complete and ready for use.

So I present my solution: it is a plugin and several binary extension modules for major platforms providing uniform API to access system clipboard. The project state is as follows:

• multi-platform: Windows, macOS, X11 and Wayland;
• pure plugin, no patches to Neovim needed;
• only essential dependencies, such as wayland-client; no special utilities, GUIs, fat toolkits etc.
• Vim-compatible custom clipboard formats for all platforms; able to detect Visual-Blocks;
• X11: support for rare features like INCR; can paste >256K from Gtk apps;

• No binaries at the moment, so user must build from source
• Not enough testing and user experience;
• Wayland: wlr-data-control protocol is required; if it's not available (for example, GNOME/Mutter) Neoclip falls back to X11 module;

So I'd be glad to get any feedback from all of you. If you think it's a good addition to your plugin collection; or maybe it's even worth shipping Neoclip as default plugin with Neovim runtime; or maybe you can spot some bugs and so on.

Thank you!

[bfredl]

Interesting work. We could avoid the threading of X11 by using the fast_events uv loop. this could be accessed via lua, though we could expose the uv handle to C code directly.

[matveyt]

We could avoid the threading of X11 by using the fast_events uv loop.

I don't see how this could be done from inside a shared object, unless something would've been exported to Lua global namespace.