clipd

clipd

A simple clipboard written in Go with support for multiple registries. It includes:

• An http server to read from and write to an embedded cache , data is received and transmitted as text/plain;
• A fully configurable cli to start the server, yank (with pipes), and paste.

This project was inspired by this post. I have been spending some time with Go, and it seemed like a good idea to get some hands-on experience.

It probably needs some refactoring, and the test coverage leaves a lot to be desired, but it's a start.

Get/install

If you have Go installed, just go get -u github.com/nicolomaioli/clipd. You can also clone the repository and go build or go install. Binaries are not available at this time.

Configuration

Checkout the --help flag. You can also create a global config file $HOME/.clipd.yaml (or json, or toml, or any format supported by viper). Here's an example config:

server:
    address: ":8891"
    develop: false
    logLevel: 3
client:
    address: ":8891"

Start with Systemd

An example clipd.service (you will probably want to change User and the path to the executable in ExecStart):

[Unit]
Description=clipd server
After=network.target
StartLimitIntervalSec=0

[Service]
Type=simple
Restart=always
RestartSec=1
User=pi
ExecStart=/home/pi/go/bin/clipd start -l 0

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Put it in /etc/systemd/system/clipd.service, then:

# Set correct permissions
sudo chmod 644 /etc/systemd/system/clipd.service

# Start it
sudo systemctl start clipd.service

# Get the status
systemctl status clipd.service

# Enable it
sudo systemctl enable clipd.service

# Get the logs
journalctl -u clipd

Over SSH with port forwarding

If clipd is running on the target machine on port 8891, you can access it from your local machine with port forwarding:

ssh -L 9188:localhost:8891 user@host

Then, on the client, you can access the clipboard with:

echo "Hello world!" | clipd yank -a 9188
clipd paste -a 9188
# Hello world!

Neovim

:help g:clipboard for all the good stuff. Here is a minimal init.vim:

let g:clipboard = {
      \   'name': 'clipd',
      \   'copy': {
      \      '+': 'clipd yank',
      \      '*': 'clipd yank',
      \    },
      \   'paste': {
      \      '+': 'clipd paste',
      \      '*': 'clipd paste',
      \   },
      \ }

set clipboard+=unnamedplus

Tmux

You can specify your own clipboard in Tmux:

bind-key -T copy-mode-vi y send-keys -X copy-pipe-and-cancel "clipd yank"
bind-key -T copy-mode-vi Enter send-keys -X copy-pipe-and-cancel "clipd paste"

Web UI

Adding a basic web UI is probably going to be the next step in the development of clipd. One consideration here is that the server reads and return text/plain content, so the output in particular should be properly sanitized before it hits the browser.