wl-clip-persist

wl-clip-persist

Normally, when you copy something on Wayland and then close the application you copied from, the copied data (e.g. text) disappears and you cannot paste it anymore. If you run wl-clip-persist in the background, however, the copied data persists.

How it works

Whenever you copy something, it reads all the clipboard data into memory and then overwrites the clipboard with the data from our memory. By doing so, the data is available even after the program you copied from exits.

Wayland compositor requirements

Your compositor has to support at least one of these Wayland protocols:

• ext-data-control-v1
• wlr-data-control-unstable-v1

Usage

Clipboard Type

When you specify the clipboard to operate on, the clipboard data there will persist. The clipboards we don’t operate on will continue to behave like before.

Regular clipboard

wl-clip-persist --clipboard regular

Primary clipboard

wl-clip-persist --clipboard primary

Regular and Primary clipboard

wl-clip-persist --clipboard both

[!NOTE] The general recommendation is to operate on the regular clipboard only, since the primary clipboard seems to have unintended side effects for some applications, see here.

Optional arguments

Write timeout

Default: 3000 ms

It is possible to change the write timeout. In this example, the write timeout is reduced to 1000 ms.

wl-clip-persist --clipboard regular --write-timeout 1000

If the data size exceeds the pipe buffer capacity, we will have to wait for the receiving client to read some of the content to write the rest to it. To avoid keeping old clipboard data around for too long, there is a timeout which is also useful to limit the memory usage.

Ignore event on error

Default: disabled

With --ignore-event-on-error only selection events where no error occurred are handled. If an error occurred and the selection event is ignored, you will still be able to paste the clipboard, but only for as long as the program you copied from is open.

When this option is disabled, it will try to read the entire data for as many MIME types as possible. For example, when a clipboard event offers image/png and text/plain data and we are only able to read the text/plain data entirely because a read error occurred for image/png, then the clipboard will be overwritten with our data that only offers text/plain.

Filter

Default: no filter

With --all-mime-type-regex <REGEX> only selection events where all offered MIME types have a match for the regex are handled. You might want to use this option to ignore selection events that offer for example images. If the event is ignored, you will still be able to paste the images, but only for as long as the program you copied them from is open.

Ignore events that offer images

wl-clip-persist --clipboard regular --all-mime-type-regex '(?i)^(?!image/).+'

Ignore most events that offer something else than text

wl-clip-persist --clipboard regular --all-mime-type-regex '(?i)^(?!(?:image|audio|video|font|model)/).+'

Selection size limit

Default: no limit

With --selection-size-limit <BYTES> only selection events whose total data size does not exceed the size limit are handled. If the size limit has been exceeded, you will still be able to paste the clipboard, but only for as long as the program you copied from is open.

Ignore events that exceed the size of 1 MiB

wl-clip-persist --clipboard regular --selection-size-limit 1048576

This option can be used to limit the memory usage.

Reconnect tries

Default: 0

With --reconnect-tries, the number of tries to reconnect to the Wayland server after a Wayland error occurred will be limited.

This option only applies if a Wayland error occurred after at least one successful connection to the Wayland server has been established. If the first connection to the Wayland server on startup fails, the application will exit with exit code 1.

Reconnect delay

Default: 100 ms

With --reconnect-delay, the delay between reconnect tries to the Wayland server is adjusted.

After a Wayland error occurred, a reconnect will be tried immediately. If the reconnect failed, the delay is applied before another reconnect is tried.

Disable timestamps

Default: not disabled

With --disable-timestamps, the timestamps in the log messages are disabled. This might be useful for systemd services or similar, which provide their own timestamps.

Logging

You can modify the log level to see more of what is going on, e.g.

RUST_LOG=trace wl-clip-persist --clipboard regular

Please be aware that this will show the first ~30 bytes of your text clipboard contents whenever you copy something. So, when you create an issue with the full log, either do not copy sensitive data to your clipboard or censor it.

Troubleshooting

Primary selection mode breaks the selection system (#3)

especially those based on GTK, e.g. Thunar and Inkscape

[...] once you start using the primary mode or both, it becomes impossible to select text, because once you release the cursor to finalize the selection, it disappears.

Solution: Use the regular clipboard only, e.g.

wl-clip-persist --clipboard regular

Inkscape crashes when copy-pasting anything (#7)

Solution:

wl-clip-persist --clipboard regular --all-mime-type-regex '(?i)^(?!image/x-inkscape-svg).+'

FAQ

Is it possible to have a clipboard history?

It is perfectly possible to use a clipboard history application alongside wl-clip-persist. For example cliphist will work.

Is it possible to ignore clipboard events from password managers?

Depends. If the password manager advertises the selection event with the additional MIME type x-kde-passwordManagerHint, like for example KeePassXC does, then we can ignore the selection event via:

wl-clip-persist --clipboard regular --all-mime-type-regex '^(?!x-kde-passwordManagerHint).+'

Build from source

• Install rustup to get the rust compiler installed on your system. Install rustup
• Rust version 1.85.0 or later is required
• Build in release mode: cargo build --release
• The resulting executable can be found at target/release/wl-clip-persist

Thanks

• wl-clipboard-rs for showing how to interact with the Wayland clipboard
• wl-gammarelay-rs for showing how to use wayrs