Apr 10, 2018

Linux X desktop "clipboard" keys via exclip tool

It's been a mystery to me for a while how X terminal emulators (from xterm to Terminology) manage to copy long bits of strings spanning multiple lines without actually splitting them with \n chars, given that there's always something like "screen" or "tmux" or even "mosh" running in there.

All these use ncurses which shouldn't output "long lines of text" but rather knows width/height of a terminal and flips specific characters there when last output differs from its internal "how it should be" state/buffer.

Regardless of how this works, terminals definitely get confused sometimes, making copy-paste of long paths and commands from them into a minefield, where you never know if it'll insert full path/command or just run random parts of it instead by emitting newlines here and there.

Easy fix: bind a key combo in a WM to always "copy stuff as a single line".
Bonus points - also strip spaces from start/end, demanding no select-precision.
Even better - have it expose result as both primary and clipboard, to paste anywhere.

For a while used a trivial bash script for that, which did "xclip -in" from primary selection, some string-mangling in bash and two "xclip -out" to put result back into primary and clipboard.

It's a surprisingly difficult and suboptimal task for bash though, as - to my knowledge - you can't even replace \n chars in it without running something like "tr" or "sed".

And running xclip itself a few times is bad enough, but with a few extra binaries and under CPU load, such "clipboard keys" become unreliable due to lag from that script.

Hence finally got fed up by it and rewritten whole thing in C as a small and fast 300-liner exclip tool, largely based on xclip code.

Build like this: gcc -O2 -lX11 -lXmu exclip.c -o exclip && strip exclip

Found something like it bound to a key (e.g. Win+V for verbatim copy, and variants like Win+Shift+V for stripping spaces/newlines) to be super-useful when using terminals and text-based apps, apps that mix primary/clipboard selections, etc - all without needing to touch the mouse.

Tool is still non-trivial due to how selections and interaction with X work - code has to be event-based, negotiate content type that it wants to get, can have large buffers sent in incremental events, and then have to hold these (in a forked subprocess) and negotiate sending to other apps - i.e. not just stuff N bytes from buffer somewhere server-side and exit ("cut buffers" can work like that in X, but limited and never used).

Looking at all these was a really fun dive into how such deceptively-simple (but ancient and not in fact simple at all) things like "clipboard" work.

E.g. consider how one'd hold/send/expose stuff from huge GIMP image selection and paste it into an entirely different app (xclip -out -t TARGETS can give a hint), especially with X11 and its network transparency.

Though then again, maybe humble string manipulation in C is just as fascinating, given all the pointer juggling and tricks one'd usually have to do for that.