clipd

Free, open-source Win+V-style clipboard manager for Linux — a lightweight CopyQ alternative. One popup, one hotkey, no settings screen.

Press the hotkey, type to filter, press Enter. The popup opens in 9–11 ms because its window is created at startup and kept hidden with its list already populated — opening it does no work at all. The background process that watches your clipboard sits at 5 MB and 0% CPU when idle, because it is told about clipboard changes by the display server instead of polling for them.

Works on X11 and GNOME Wayland. Installs from one .deb, works immediately — no logout, no manual setup.

Install

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/GaneshB2334/linux-clipboard/main/scripts/install.sh | bash

Or download the package directly:

wget https://github.com/GaneshB2334/linux-clipboard/releases/latest/download/clipd_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i clipd_amd64.deb

That's it. Ctrl+Alt+C opens the popup right away — the shortcut is registered automatically during install, and paste works immediately through a kernel-level virtual keyboard, not a compositor extension, so there is nothing to log out for.

./scripts/install.sh --status      # what is installed and running
./scripts/install.sh --uninstall   # remove all of it

Building from source

sudo apt install libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev build-essential libssl-dev \
  libayatana-appindicator3-dev librsvg2-dev
cargo build --release
(cd apps/desktop && pnpm install && pnpm build)
./scripts/install.sh

Features

• Unlimited history in SQLite, deduplicated by content hash — re-copying something moves it to the top instead of adding a duplicate
• Type-to-search from the first keystroke. No Ctrl+F; arrows still navigate. Fuzzy matching over recent items is synchronous as you type, with full-text search over everything older merged in behind it
• Every format of a copy is kept (text/html + plain text + image), so "paste as plain text" still works long after the copy
• Images, with real thumbnails, dimensions, and a resize-and-copy action right from the preview pane
• Copying an image file works too — Ctrl+C on a file in a file manager, not just an image element in a browser, ends up in history as a real image
• Secrets are dropped, not hidden. The x-kde-passwordManagerHint MIME target that KeePassXC, Bitwarden, 1Password, Firefox and Chromium set is honoured first; shape detection (JWTs, sk-/ghp_/AKIA keys, PEM blocks, Luhn-valid card numbers) catches secrets pasted from a terminal. Neither is written to disk or entered into the search index
• Emoji picker as a second tab (Ctrl+E or Tab) — search, categories, skin tone, recents
• Pins, delete, source-app and timestamp in the preview pane

The popup itself

Floating, rounded, transparent panel — not a plain rectangle. Drag it by the header to reposition it; it remembers where you left it, across closes and across restarts.

Keyboard

↑ ↓	navigate
Enter	paste
Shift+Enter	paste as plain text
Ctrl+Enter	copy without pasting
Alt+1…9	paste the Nth item
Ctrl+P	pin
Delete	remove
Ctrl+E / Tab	switch to the emoji tab
Esc	close

The hotkey

Ctrl+Alt+C is registered automatically at install — no manual step. It is configurable in ~/.config/clipd/hotkey (one line, e.g. ctrl+alt+b), no rebuild needed.

Super+V has to be added by hand, in Settings → Keyboard → View and Customize Shortcuts → Custom Shortcuts:

Name:     Clipboard
Command:  /usr/bin/clipctl toggle
Shortcut: Super+V

GNOME reserves the entire Super+<key> space for itself and refuses every attempt by another application to bind one — the desktop's own shortcut mechanism is the only route in. Every other combination is handled automatically.

How paste works

Paste is injected through /dev/uinput, a kernel facility that creates a virtual keyboard the display server treats as real hardware. That's what makes it work identically on X11 and Wayland, and on any compositor, with no per-desktop integration: install grants the one-time permission it needs (a udev rule for every future boot, plus an immediate ACL grant so the current session doesn't need a logout either).

A GNOME Shell extension is bundled as a second, independent path for window focus and paste, used automatically if it's ever needed — but it is not what the primary experience depends on.

Architecture

crates/
  clipd-ipc/       wire types shared by daemon, UI and CLI (generates the TS bindings)
  clipd-core/      SQLite history, FTS, dedupe, content + secret detection
  clipd-platform/  backends behind one Cmd/Signal interface
    x11.rs           XFIXES capture, selection ownership, XTEST paste, XI2 hotkey
    wayland.rs       native capture/ownership through wl-paste/wl-copy
    uinput.rs        kernel-level virtual keyboard for paste, any compositor
    shell_ext.rs     GNOME Shell extension, used as a fallback
  clipd/           the daemon — no GUI dependencies, single writer to the DB
  clipctl/         tiny socket client; what a desktop keybinding runs
apps/desktop/      Tauri 2 + React popup
extension/         the GNOME Shell fallback helper
docs/              findings, including the ones that cost the most to learn

The daemon owns the database and the clipboard. The UI is a view over $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/clipd.sock and can crash or be restarted without losing a copy. TypeScript types are generated from the Rust wire types, so the two cannot drift.

cargo test covers storage, dedupe, search and secret detection.

Known limitations

• KDE and wlroots Wayland compositors are not a supported target. GNOME (X11 or Wayland) is
• No settings UI; configuration is ~/.config/clipd/hotkey and CLIPD_HOTKEY
• History is stored unencrypted at ~/.local/share/clipd/. Detected secrets are never written there, but ordinary copied text is
• INCR (chunked X11 transfers, for very large payloads) is implemented but not exercised against a real sender

License

GPL-3.0-or-later — see LICENSE. Free as in freedom: you can run, study, share and modify it; anything you distribute based on it has to stay under the same terms. Third-party notices are in THIRD_PARTY_LICENSES.md.