📋 mclip

mclip (for "Memory Clipboard") is a very simple Linux clipboard manager which stores its data inside a POSIX shared memory object.

Today several clipboad tools exist but almost all of them require a specific dependency (X11, Wayland, Tmux, SSH, etc.). See for example the Clipboard integration page in the Neovim documentation.

mclip is a tiny binary which only depends on low level Linux system functions like shm_open and mmap. So it should be usable in very basic environments.

Install

Usage

This section explains how to use mclip in several tools.

• CLI
• Neovim
• Zellij

CLI

Display the help.

mclip --help
Usage: mclip [OPTION]

Clipboard which stores its data inside shared memory.

         h-, --help      show quick summary of options
         i-, --in        read text from standard input and write it into the clipboard shared memory (default)
         o-, --out       print the content of the clipboard shared memory

To save text into the clipboard just enter it through stdin.

# Using a pipe
$ echo "Hello world!" | mclip

# Entering characters with the keyboard (press Ctrl+D to finish your input)
$ mclip
I can
enter 
text 
on 
several 
lines
<Ctrl+D>

You can finally output the content of the clipboard.

$ mclip -o
Hello world!

Neovim

Neovim provides a Clipboard integration which allows to provide any clipboard tool.

You can configure mclip as the Neovim clipboard tool using the following Lua configuration object.

vim.g.clipboard = {
    name = "mclip",
    copy = {
        ["+"] = "mclip",
        ["*"] = "mclip",
    },
    paste = {
        ["+"] = "mclip -o",
        ["*"] = "mclip -o",
    },
    cache_enabled = 1,
}

Zellij

TODO