zzzclip

A Wayland clipboard manager that supports:

• Clipboard history
• Clipboard persisting: restore the clipboard after the program providing it exits; this is lazy, meaning zzzclip won't replace the selection until it needs to
• Clipboard-as-files: makes the current clipboard contents accessible via file
• Customizable MIME type selection: choose which MIME types to keep (this means image support for all features!)

POSIX C11, minimal dependencies. You know the drill.

requirements

To run, you will need:

• A Wayland compositor that supports either the ext-data-control or wlr-data-control protocols.
  You can find a compatibility table here; basically all major compositors (except Mutter) support at least one.

installation

If you use Arch, zzzclip is on the AUR. Otherwise, static binaries are available from the releases section. Alternatively, follow the instructions below and build it yourself.

building

To build, you will need:

• Wayland client libraries (wayland on Arch, libwayland-client on Debian/Ubuntu)
• wayland-scanner (also wayland on Arch, libwayland-bin on Debian/Ubuntu)
• The normal stuff (make, a C compiler, etc.)

To build, run make build.
To install, run make install (might require sudo).
To run tests, run make check. (Heads up, this will wipe your clipboard and fill your history with junk if you have a manager running!)

usage

To start the main process, run zzzclip daemon. More detailed instructions can be found by using -h on a specific subcommand (zzzclip daemon -h, zzzclip list -h, zzzclip get -h, zzzclip delete -h).

To integrate zzzclip with a selector program like fuzzel or rofi:

zzzclip list | fuzzel --dmenu --with-nth=2 --accept-nth=1 | xargs zzzclip get
zzzclip list | rofi -dmenu -display-columns 2 -column 1 | cut -f1 | xargs zzzclip get
zzzclip list | wofi --dmenu --pre-display-cmd "echo '%s' | cut -f2" -k /dev/null | cut -f1 | xargs zzzclip get 

The clipboard-as-files feature will, by default, put the files in $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/zzzclip. On my system, this is located at /run/user/1000/zzzclip. To make this more accessible, you can override ZZZCLIP_SYMLINK_PATH to change the directory, create a symlink (e.g. ln -s $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/zzzclip ~/clipboard), or create a bookmark in your file manager. If your file manager is GTK-based, this should carry over to other GTK-based file managers and file pickers as well, like in your browser's upload window.

configuration

zzzclip respects the environment variables ZZZCLIP_CONFIG_PATH, ZZZCLIP_STORE_PATH, and ZZZCLIP_SYMLINK_PATH to override the config file location, history directory, and clipboard-as-file directory, respectively. By default, configuration is located at $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/zzzclip, history at $XDG_STATE_HOME/zzzclip, and clipboard-as-files at $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/zzzclip.

Configuration is located at $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/zzzclip. I'll make proper documentation later, but for now, here's the default config file:

# maximum number of entries in history
max-entries = 100

# maximum bytes for a clipboard item (per-mimetype, not per-copy)
max-item-bytes = 10000000

# maximum characters to show in clipboard previews (`zzzclip list`, some parts of `zzzclip get`)
max-preview = 1000

# whether to replace the clipboard contents when it's cleared, like if a program exits
replace-clipboard-on-clear = true

# determines which MIME types zzzclip will request and store
# [] stores every MIME type matched inside
# () stores the first set of MIME types matched inside
# regexes behave differently based on whether its parent is [] or (): every match for [], first match for ()
# all regexes are prefixed with ^ and suffixed with $ and are case-insensitive
# example: if the current clipboard offers image/webp, image/jpeg, and text/html, zzzclip will store
# image/webp and text/html with this config
mime-pref = [
    (image/png image/webp image/jpeg image/.*)
    (text/plain;charset=utf-8 UTF8_STRING text/plain TEXT text/.*)
]

# makes the clipboard accessible via file in $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/zzzclip
clipboard-as-files = true

todo

• better error handling
• automatic deduplicating
• fallback in mime preferences if entry too large
• icon support

thanks

wl-clipboard, fuzzel, cliphist, clipvault, fuzzel for inspiration/guidance