Cypher Clipboard
A Linux clipboard manager that remembers text, images and files across X11 and Wayland.
What Cypher Clipboard is
The clipboard history Linux never shipped. Cypher Clipboard captures everything you copy or cut, whether text, images, files or raw binary data, and keeps it in a scrollable list. Click any earlier entry to put it back on the clipboard, or cut it out of the history. It is a small native GTK 3 program written in C++, and it works on X11 and Wayland without any configuration.
Cypher Clipboard features
What it actually does.
Text, plain and formatted
Both are kept, so formatting survives a trip through the history.
Images
Shown as previews and restored to the clipboard intact.
Files and raw data
Copied files are kept as URI lists, so pasting into a file manager still works, and any other clipboard data is kept as it came.
A hundred entries
The newest copy goes to the top and repeats are ignored. The limit is one constant in the source.
X11 and Wayland
Works on both out of the box, on any distribution with GTK 3.
Native and light
A resizable GTK window that follows your system theme and uses almost no CPU or memory.
How to use Cypher Clipboard
From a fresh install to the thing working.
1 Build it
- Install the GTK 3 development package: libgtk-3-dev on Debian and Ubuntu, gtk3-devel on Fedora, gtk3 on Arch.
- Clone the repository and compile: g++ -std=c++17 *.cpp -o clipboard `pkg-config --cflags --libs gtk+-3.0`.
- Copy the binary to ~/.local/bin (or /usr/local/bin for every user) and make sure that folder is on your PATH.
2 Use the history
- Run clipboard. From then on, every Ctrl+C and Ctrl+X lands at the top of the list.
- Click an entry to copy it back.
- Right-click it, or select it and press Cut Selected, to copy it and remove it from the history.
- Clear empties the whole list.
3 Open it from a shortcut
- Bind the clipboard command to a key such as Ctrl+Shift+V in your desktop’s keyboard settings.
- A built-in global shortcut is planned.
Built with
Licence
Made by Kencypher. Not open source.
Cypher Clipboard was written by Kencypher. The source is not published and is not licensed for reuse. You have permission to run it — that is the whole of it.
You may
- Run it on as many of your own machines as you like
- Use it for anything, including commercial work
- Pass an unmodified copy to a friend, free
You may not, without asking
- Sell it or charge for access
- Re-upload or mirror it anywhere
- Rebrand it or publish it as your own
- Decompile it or lift its assets
This is enforced. Re-uploading it, repackaging it, stripping the author's name off it or passing it off as your own is copyright infringement — protected without registration under the Berne Convention — and is pursued with DMCA takedowns to the host, CDN, app store and search engine, platform reports for impersonation, and legal proceedings where the infringement is commercial, repeated, or involves falsely claiming authorship.
Asking first is free, and the answer is usually yes — kencypher56@gmail.com. The only official source is this store; a copy from anywhere else is not one Kencypher published.
Good to know
- If you miss Win+V from Windows, this is the same idea for Linux.
- It runs as a window, not a background service: history is captured while it is open.
- The history lives in memory. Keeping it across restarts is planned but not there yet.
- Four kinds of clipboard content are understood by name: plain and formatted text, images as PNG, BMP or JPEG, copied files as the URI list a file manager expects, and anything else kept byte for byte so it pastes back into whatever produced it.
- A repeat is only ignored when it matches the entry at the top, so copying the same thing twice in a row costs nothing, while copying A, then B, then A again keeps both A entries where you left them.
- A file copy shows the first three paths and then a count, so a list of forty files still reads as one line in the history.