Ruby Clipboard

Lets you access the clipboard on Linux, MacOS, Windows and Cygwin.

Usage

Clipboard.copy
Clipboard.paste
Clipboard.clear

Setup

Add to Gemfile:

gem 'clipboard'
gem 'ffi', :platforms => [:mswin, :mingw]

Linux: You will need the xclip or xsel program. On debian/ubuntu this is: sudo apt-get install xclip

Remarks

Multiple Clipboards

On Linux, you can choose from which clipboard you want to paste from by passing it as an argument. The default is CLIPBOARD.

copy copies to all clipboards in Clipboard::Linux::CLIPBOARDS.

Windows Encoding

Windows uses UTF-16LE as its default encoding, so pasted strings will always come in UTF-16LE. You can manually convert them to your desired encoding (e.g. UTF-8) using the String#encode method:

Clipboard.paste.encode('UTF-8')

SSH

To use the clipboard through ssh, you need to install xauth on your server and connect via ssh -X or ssh -Y. Please note that some server settings restrict this feature.

Java

There is a Java implementation included (Clipboard::Java) as an option for JRuby. On Linux, it always operates only on the CLIPBOARD clipboard.

TODO

Native support on X (don't depend on xclip/xsel) would be great

blip

blip is a handy commandline wrapper that lets you quickly copy file content to your clipboard: blip!