clipdir

Clipdir is a clipboard history manager for wayland. Its workflow is the same as cliphist, but instead of a database it stores each clipboard entry as its own file in a directory. This makes it simple to sync the clipboard history across multiple devices.

Features

• Store clipboard changes as files in a directory for easy syncing
• Show history using dmenu/rofi/fzf or similar pickers
• Support for various mime-types, including images - data integrity is preserved
• Deduplication
• Support for CLIPBOARD_STATE (see man wl-clipboard)

Installation

Currently, only cargo is supported: cargo install clipdir

Usage

$ clipdir help
Usage: clipdir [OPTIONS] <COMMAND>

Commands:
  store, -s, --store    Store a clipboard entry by stdin
  list, -l, --list      List clipboard entries prefixed with their id
  decode, -d, --decode  Output a clipboard entry by dmenu stdin
  help                  Print this message or the help of the given subcommand(s)

Listen for clipboard changes

$ clipdir store --help
Usage: clipdir {store|--store|-s} [OPTIONS]

Options:
      --state <state>
          [env: CLIPBOARD_STATE=] [default: data]
      --storage-path <storage-path>
          [env: CLIPDIR_STORAGE_PATH=] [default: /home/hashworks/.local/share/clipdir]
      --byte-limit <byte-limit>
          [env: CLIPDIR_BYTE_LIMIT=] [default: 5242880]
      --dedupe-search-limit <dedupe-search-limit>
          [env: CLIPDIR_DEDUPE_SEARCH_LIMIT=] [default: 1000]

Call this with your desktop environment: wl-paste --watch clipdir store

wl-paste will listen for changes to your clipboard and call clipdir store which will store the clipboard entry in the storage directory (~/.local/share/clipdir by default). If not specified otherwise it will store entries up to 5 MiB and search for duplicates in the last 1000 entries.

List clipboard history

$ clipdir list --help
List clipboard entries prefixed with their id

Usage: clipdir {list|--list|-l} [OPTIONS]

Options:
      --preview-length <preview-length>
          [env: CLIPDIR_PREVIEW_LENGTH=] [default: 100]
      --storage-path <storage-path>
          [env: CLIPDIR_STORAGE_PATH=] [default: /home/hashworks/.local/share/clipdir]

Add a keyboard binding to your desktop environment to pipe the output of clipdir list to dmenu/rofi/fzf or whatever picker you use. Afterwards extract the clipboard entry with clipdir decode and pipe it to wl-copy to set the clipboard.

$ clipdir list | dmenu | clipdir decode | wl-copy
$ clipdir list | rofi -dmenu | clipdir decode | wl-copy
$ clipdir list | fzf --no-sort | clipdir decode | wl-copy

Cleanup clipboard history

You can clean up the history by deleting files in the storage directory. Simply add one of the following commands as a systemd timer:

Delete files older than 365 days:

$ find ~/.local/share/clipdir -type f -mtime +365 -exec rm {} \;

Only keep the last 100,000 files:

$ find ~/.local/share/clipdir -type f | sort -r | tail -n +100001 | xargs -I {} rm {}

Synd clipboard history

Use tools like syncthing to sync the storage directory across multiple devices.