x-selection-pipe

x-selection-pipe monitors the Xorg clipboard resp. primary selection, piping all changes to stdout. Optionally, clipboard and primary selection will be kept in sync.

Rationale

While there is no apparent lack of clipboard monitoring daemons, none of those I had tried allowed for programmable shell actions to be triggered by clipboard changes. One of the obstacles I had encountered is that the program interface would allow for isolated queries to clipboard history, but would not provide for an on-going text-based stream of clipboard changes (except by resorting to polling). x-selection-pipe is meant to provide just this sort of streaming interface, which can then be used to feed clipboard events into shell pipelines.

Usage

usage: xselection-pipe [-h] [--sync]
                       [{primary,clipboard} [{primary,clipboard} ...]]

positional arguments:
  {primary,clipboard}  The set of selections to monitor. (default: ('primary',
                       'clipboard'))

optional arguments:
  -h, --help           show this help message and exit
  --sync, -s           Sync primary selection and clipboard on changes.
                       (default: False)

Requirements

x-selection-pipe relies on Gtk+ 3 and pygobject.

TODO

• Implement a complementing (but separate) program which supports a kill-ring-like clipboard stack