Clipboard Daemon


Normally, when you copy something in an X application and you close it, the content of the clipboard is lost. This is probably one of the biggest reasons why people keep saying that copy & paste in Linux "doesn't work".

Clipboard Daemon is a program that keeps the content of your X clipboard in memory, so the clipboard won' get lost even after you close the application you copied from. It's a daemon - it has no GUI. You start it and it'll run in the background and Just Work(tm).

Example:

  1. Start AbiWord.
  2. Type in 'hello world'. Select everything and click Copy.
  3. Close AbiWord.
  4. Start gedit.
  5. Click Paste. Normally nothing will happen. But if Clipboard Daemon is running, pasting will work.
 

Download

This application only depends on GTK+ 2 (and X), and nothing else. GNOME is not required.

Source code (3.0 KB)
Binary (3.7 KB)

To compile the source code, simply extract the tarball, go to the source subfolder, and type 'make'. If you don't want to compile, you can download the binary tarball. The binary should work on all Linux distrbutions with GTK+ 2.

There is no installation procedure. You run it by typing './clipboard-daemon'.

The license is GPL.

 

See also

The enhanced file selector for GTK+ 2.2. It's 100% compatible with all current applications.

I've tried to submit a patch for gnome-settings-daemon before but it was rejected. See this link for discussion: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2003-September/msg00193.html

Mike Hearn explains how MS Windows's clipboard works: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2003-September/msg00257.html