Wlroots: clipboard manager protocol

[acrisci]

Is there interest in supporting a clipboard manager protocol?

The clipboard manager would be an out of process application that gets an api for clipboard contents. Primarily hooks for clipboard selection change it can use to change the contents of a copy/paste.

The clipboard manager can use this to:

• store history of clipboard contents
• offer an interface to get/set the contents of the clipboard (like xclip or xsel).
• show a tray icon where the user can select clipboard contents from history
• multiple clipboard selections handled by the manager

For more on what a clipboard manager can do, see this list of clipboard managers.

[ddevault]

Yes, I think we should do this at some point.

[lindhe]

Is the current behaviour the same as in i3, that when an application is closed anything copied from that program is lost?

[emersion]

Yes.

[r3k2]

yes please

[ghost]

Some clipboard managers (like clipster) allow users to pass a list of applications which should be ignored when storing clipboard history, most notably password managers. Under wayland this can only be done by the window manager, so please consider this when designing the protocol. This is probably a very useful feature to many; inspecting the source code of pass I see they use a hack exactly for this (but only support klipper; doing it in wayland itself would support everything).

EDIT:
A better idea though might be to add a --no-log switch to the sway equivalent of xsel/xclip. Password managers would need to switch to that for their auto-paste feature, anyway.

[Ongy]

Just a wild idea, password managers could probably use the input method protocol in the long run. And just input the password directly (gui or cli manager shouldn't matter much I think).

[emersion]

Closing because this has moved to wlr-protocols: https://github.com/swaywm/wlr-protocols/issues/20