Clip is a GTK-based clipboard manager. Clip was written by Richard Burnison after he became frustrated with the current clipboard manager offerings for Linux. While similar in appearance and functionality to Parcellite, Clip offers additional features not provided by other clipboard managers.
Clip is offered under the MIT license and may be downloaded with Git at git://github.com/burnison/clip.git.
Once executing, Clip will monitor your clipboard. All clipboard contents will be added to its local history, available by pressing C-M-P. A pop-up menu will appear, navigable by mouse or keyboard. Selecting a menu item will set its value as the current clipboard contents.
Clip supports the ability to lock history items, effectively making them immutable to deletion. Right clicking on a history item or pressing "L" when an item is selected will toggle its lock mode. Menu items displayed in a bold text are locked.
Clip's history may be cleared by selecting the "Clear" menu item. This will delete all unlocked history items. Any locked history items will be left on the list for use.
Clip also allows history to be disabled/enabled. Selecting the "Disable History" menu item will disable clipboard history. Keep in mind this mode will not disable active clipboard selection. To re-enable history, select the "Enable History" menu item.
Clip also allows a user to search for a previously-archived string by pressing "/" when the pop-up menu is visible. This will enter search mode. Clip searches using Perl-compatible regex in a default case-insensitive mode (case insensitivity may be disabled by prefixing a pattern with "(?-i)"). The first history item matching the input pattern will be highlighted; pressing tab will move the active focus to the next match. Pressing enter or clicking on the desired menu item will set it as active.
When pressing 0-9, the nth menu item will be selected. This behaviour is unavailable when searching and is intended for quick access when the actual position is already known.
Clip provides the ability to delete individual history items. To delete a single history item, change the menu selection to the item to be deleted. Press the "Delete" or "d" keys on your keyboard. If unlocked, the item will be removed from the history.
Clip allows you to edit the value of a selected entry by pressing "e" or "E". This will pop-up a dialog in which you can make any changes to the desired string. While "e" only provides a way to edit the selected entry, pressing "E" will additionally promote the edited value to the active clipboard value.
When a menu entry is currently selected, pressing 'J' will cause the top record to merge with the next record, similar to the join behaviour of Vi. Joining a row will not activate it, allowing multiple joins to be made in one trip to the dialog. Finally, the usage counter is inherited from the left-most entry as opposed to merging the counters. This was done to prevent entries from remaining around for too long.
Similar to Vi, Clip can change the case of a record by pressing "u" or "U" when a record is selected. To change the case to lower case, press "u"; to change case to upper, press "U". Changing case of the head record does not activate it.
In addition to the dynamic trimming feature, pressing "t" will trim both left and right sides of a selected entry. This operation will not modify the current clipboard value.
Clip supports the ability to mark (or tag) an entry for quick selection. To mark a selected record, press 'm' and then the desired mark letter. For example, pressing 'ma' will mark the record with the tag, 'a'. The mark will be displayed immediately to the left of the record.
To activate a marked record, press the gave character, '' followed by the desired mark. For example, to select the previously-selected 'a' record, press '\a'. If the mark is found, the correlated record will be activated.
When a semi-sensitive value is present on your clipboard, you may toggle a display mask by pressing '*' with the target menu item highlighted. This will mask-out the displayed text. Be aware that masked values are not encrypted or in any way obfuscated in Clip's database. Because the actual displayed value is rendered unreadable, masking works best when used in conjunction with marks/tags.
When Clip receives a request to clear the active clipboard, it will remove the current value from its history. This is intended to realize expectations about privacy, such as those made by password stores like Keepassx. This feature may have otherwise unwanted outcomes if third-party applications frequently clear the clipboard.
At runtime, Clip is able to use one of four whitespace trimming strategies:
- Off - No trimming is performed.
- Left - Whitespace is trimmed from the left of each clipboard entry.
- Right - Whitespace is trimmed from the right side of each clipboard entry.
- Both - Whitespace is trimmed from both sides of each clipboard entry.
These strategies may be changed by selecting the "Trim" menu item, which indicates its active mode. This feature is non-destructive and will not change the source data. Keep in mind that when enabled, this feature may result in the primary clipboard selection to become unselected in some applications (such as rxvt) iff Clip is compiled with syncing.
Clip employs a duplication detection mechanism that computes the Levenshtein distance between existing entries and new entries to determine if they are logical duplicates. By default, this is only applied to the top 10% of all records so that history doesn't become sporadic. More specifically, this implementation considers records as duplicates only if they are similar in both time and space.
This feature is mainly intended to reduce the number of duplicate values that would otherwise clutter the history. It works on the assumption that the last record selected is the "correct" record for a given value. Consider the following values endered into Clip in the following order:
- @example.com
- xample.com,
- example.com
After adding all three values to Clip, Clip would only show the final record, 'example.com', which is very likely the expected value.
- Clip interacts oddly with applications that do not use text-based clipboard contents (such as InkScape and LibreOffice). If you do not like how these programs interact, you can temporarily disable Clip's history.