w-scissor: Wayland clipboard utilities

This project implements two command-line Wayland clipboard utilities, ws-copy and ws-paste, that let you easily copy data between the clipboard and Unix pipes, sockets, files and so on.

Usage is as simple as:

# copy a simple text message
$ printf 'Hello world!' | ws-copy

# copy the list of files in Downloads
$ ls ~/Downloads | ws-copy

# copy an image file
$ ws-copy --type=image/png < ~/Pictures/photo.png

# paste to a file
$ ws-paste > clipboard.txt

# grep each pasted word in file source.c
$ for word in $(ws-paste); do grep $word source.c; done

# copy the previous command
$ fc -ln -- -1 | ws-copy

# replace the current selection with the list of types it's offered in
$ ws-paste --list-types | ws-copy

Although ws-copy and ws-paste are particularly optimized for plain text and other textual content formats, they fully support content of arbitrary MIME types. You can specify the type to use with the --type option.

Options

For ws-copy:

• -o, --paste-once Only serve one paste request and then exit. Unless a clipboard manager specifically designed to prevent this is in use, this has the effect of clearing the clipboard after the first paste, which is useful for copying sensitive data such as passwords. Note that this may break pasting into some clients, in particular pasting into XWayland windows is known to break when this option is used.
• -c, --clear Instead of copying anything, clear the clipboard so that nothing is copied.

For ws-paste:

• -l, --list-types Instead of pasting the selection, output the list of MIME types it is offered in.
• -w command..., --watch command... Instead of pasting once and exiting, continuously watch the clipboard for changes, and run the specified command each time a new selection appears. The spawned process can read the clipboard contents from its standard input. This mode requires a compositor that supports the wlroots data-control protocol.

For both:

• -p, --primary Use the "primary" clipboard instead of the regular clipboard.
• -t mime/type, --type mime/type Set the MIME type for the content. For ws-copy this option controls which type ws-copy will offer the content as. For ws-paste it controls which of the offered types ws-paste will request the content in. In addition to specific MIME types such as image/png, ws-paste also accepts generic type names such as text and image which make it automatically pick some offered MIME type that matches the given generic name.
• -s seat-name, --seat seat-name Specify which seat ws-copy and ws-paste should work with. Wayland natively supports multi-seat configurations where each seat gets its own mouse pointer, keyboard focus, and among other things its own separate clipboard. The name of the default seat is likely default or seat0, and additional seat names normally come form udev(7) property ENV{WL_SEAT}. You can view the list of the currently available seats as advertised by the compositor using the weston-info(1) tool. If you don't specify the seat name explicitly, ws-copy and ws-paste will pick a seat arbitrarily. If you are using a single-seat system, there is little reason to use this option.
• -v, --version Display the version of w-scissor and some short info about its license.
• -h, --help Display a short help message listing the available options.

Building

w-scissor is a simple Meson project, so building it is just:

# clone
$ git clone https://github.com/charmander/w-scissor
$ cd w-scissor

# build
$ meson build
$ cd build
$ ninja

# install
$ sudo ninja install

w-scissor supports Linux and BSD systems, and is also known to work on Mac OS X and GNU Hurd. The only mandatory dependency is the wayland-client library (try package named wayland-devel or libwayland-dev).

Optional dependencies for building:

• wayland-scanner
• wayland-protocols (version 1.12 or later)

If these are found during configuration, w-scissor gets built with additional protocols support, which enables features such as primary selection support and --watch mode.

License

w-scissor is free software, available under the GNU General Public License version 3 or later.