wl-clipboard-rs

wl-clipboard-rs

Documentation (master)

A safe Rust crate for working with the Wayland clipboard.

This crate is intended to be used by terminal applications, clipboard managers and other utilities which don't spawn Wayland surfaces (windows). If your application has a window, please use the appropriate Wayland protocols for interacting with the Wayland clipboard (wl_data_device from the core Wayland protocol, the primary_selection protocol for the primary selection), for example via the smithay-clipboard crate.

The protocol used for clipboard interaction is ext-data-control or wlr-data-control. When using the regular clipboard, the compositor must support any version of either protocol. When using the "primary" clipboard, the compositor must support any version of ext-data-control, or the second version of the wlr-data-control protocol.

For example applications using these features, see wl-clipboard-rs-tools/src/bin/wl_copy.rs and wl-clipboard-rs-tools/src/bin/wl_paste.rs which implement terminal apps similar to wl-clipboard or wl-clipboard-rs-tools/src/bin/wl_clip.rs which implements a Wayland version of xclip.

The Rust implementation of the Wayland client is used by default; use the native_lib feature to link to libwayland-client.so for communication instead. A dlopen feature is also available for loading libwayland-client.so dynamically at runtime rather than linking to it.

The code of the crate itself (and the code of the example utilities) is 100% safe Rust. This doesn't include the dependencies.

Examples

Copying to the regular clipboard:

use wl_clipboard_rs::copy::{MimeType, Options, Source};

let opts = Options::new();
opts.copy(
    Source::Bytes("Hello world!".to_string().into_bytes().into()),
    MimeType::Autodetect,
)?;

Pasting plain text from the regular clipboard:

use std::io::Read;

use wl_clipboard_rs::paste::{get_contents, ClipboardType, Error, MimeType, Seat};

let result = get_contents(ClipboardType::Regular, Seat::Unspecified, MimeType::Text);
match result {
    Ok((mut pipe, _)) => {
        let mut contents = vec![];
        pipe.read_to_end(&mut contents)?;
        println!("Pasted: {}", String::from_utf8_lossy(&contents));
    }

    Err(Error::NoSeats) | Err(Error::ClipboardEmpty) | Err(Error::NoMimeType) => {
        // The clipboard is empty or doesn't contain text, nothing to worry about.
    }

    Err(err) => Err(err)?,
}

Watching the regular clipboard for selection changes and reading each new text selection:

use std::io::Read;

use wl_clipboard_rs::paste::Seat;
use wl_clipboard_rs::watch::{ClipboardEvent, ClipboardType, Watcher};

let mut watcher = Watcher::new(ClipboardType::Regular, Seat::Unspecified)?;
while let Some(event) = watcher.next_event()? {
    match event {
        ClipboardEvent::Changed {
            mime_types,
            mut offer,
            ..
        } if mime_types.iter().any(|m| m == "text/plain") => {
            let mut contents = String::new();
            offer.receive("text/plain")?.read_to_string(&mut contents)?;
            println!("Clipboard changed: {contents}");
        }
        ClipboardEvent::Changed { .. } => {}
        ClipboardEvent::Cleared { .. } => println!("Clipboard cleared"),
    }
}

Obtain a [watch::CancelHandle] from [watch::Watcher::cancel_handle] to stop a watcher blocked in [watch::Watcher::next_event] from another thread.

Checking if the "primary" clipboard is supported (note that this might be unnecessary depending on your crate usage, the regular copying and pasting functions do report if the primary selection is unsupported when it is requested):

use wl_clipboard_rs::utils::{is_primary_selection_supported, PrimarySelectionCheckError};

match is_primary_selection_supported() {
    Ok(supported) => {
        // We have our definitive result. False means that ext/wlr-data-control is present
        // and did not signal the primary selection support, or that only wlr-data-control
        // version 1 is present (which does not support primary selection).
    }
    Err(PrimarySelectionCheckError::NoSeats) => {
        // Impossible to give a definitive result. Primary selection may or may not be
        // supported.

        // The required protocol (ext-data-control, or wlr-data-control version 2) is there,
        // but there are no seats. Unfortunately, at least one seat is needed to check for the
        // primary clipboard support.
    }
    Err(PrimarySelectionCheckError::MissingProtocol) => {
        // The data-control protocol (required for wl-clipboard-rs operation) is not
        // supported by the compositor.
    }
    Err(_) => {
        // Some communication error occurred.
    }
}

Included terminal utilities

• wl-paste: implements wl-paste from wl-clipboard.
• wl-copy: implements wl-copy from wl-clipboard.
• wl-clip: a Wayland version of xclip.

Stuff that would be neat to add:

• Utility that mimics xsel commandline flags.

License: MIT OR Apache-2.0