Normally, when you copy something on Wayland and then close the application you copied from, the copied data (e.g. text) disappears and you cannot paste it anymore. If you run wl-clip-persist in the background, however, the copied data persists.
Whenever you copy something, it reads all the clipboard data into memory and then overwrites the clipboard with the data from our memory. By doing so, the data is available even after the program you copied from exits.
When you specify the clipboard to operate on, the clipboard data there will persist. The clipboards we don’t operate on will continue to behave like before.
Regular clipboard
wl-clip-persist --clipboard regular
Primary clipboard
wl-clip-persist --clipboard primary
Regular and Primary clipboard
wl-clip-persist --clipboard both
The wayland display is usually derived from the environment variables (WAYLAND_DISPLAY), but it can also be set explicitly.
wl-clip-persist --clipboard regular --display wayland-1
Default read timeout: 500ms
Default write timeout: 3000ms
It is possible to change the read and write timeouts. In this example, the read timeout is reduced to 50ms and the write timeout to 1000ms.
wl-clip-persist --clipboard regular --read-timeout 50 --write-timeout 1000
Currently, whenever we read the clipboard data it blocks our main thread. That means that until we haven’t read the entire data or the read timeout occurred, we won’t be able to see new clipboard events. It is even possible that while we are reading the clipboard data a new clipboard event occurs and we overwrite their clipboard data with our old data.
When we write clipboard data (i.e. send the clipboard data to another program), though, we do that in a background thread.
Default: disabled
With --ignore-event-on-timeout only selection events where no read timeout occurred are handled. If a read timeout occurred and the selection event is ignored, you will still be able to paste the clipboard, but only for as long as the program you copied from is open.
When this option is disabled and a read timeout occurs, the current clipboard is overwritten with the data that we were able to read until then. For example, when a clipboard event offers image/png and text/plain data and we are only able to read the text/plain data entirely until the timeout occurs, then the clipboard will be overwritten with our data that only offers text/plain.
Default: disabled
With --ignore-event-on-error only selection events where no error occurred are handled. If an error occurred and the selection event is ignored, you will still be able to paste the clipboard, but only for as long as the program you copied from is open.
When this option is disabled, it will try to read the entire data for as many MIME types as possible. For example, when a clipboard event offers image/png and text/plain data and we are only able to read the text/plain data entirely because a read error occurred for image/png, then the clipboard will be overwritten with our data that only offers text/plain.
Default: no filter
With --all-mime-type-regex <REGEX> only selection events where all offered MIME types have a match for the regex are handled.
You might want to use this option to ignore selection events that offer for example images. If the event is ignored, you will still be able to paste the images, but only for as long as the program you copied them from is open.
Ignore events that offer images
wl-clip-persist --clipboard regular --all-mime-type-regex '(?i)^(?!image/).+'
Ignore most events that offer something else than text
wl-clip-persist --clipboard regular --all-mime-type-regex '(?i)^(?!(?:image|audio|video|font|model)/).+'
Since the clipboard data might be huge (e.g. for images), this option might be helpful to avoid blocking the main thread by reading the data for too long. Also, it might happen that the program we are copying the data from might freeze during the time we are reading the data, so it is possible to use this option to avoid these scenarios for specific data types like images.
Default: practically unlimited
With --selection-size-limit <BYTES> only selection events whose total data size does not exceed the size limit are handled. If the size limit has been exceeded, you will still be able to paste the clipboard, but only for as long as the program you copied from is open.
Ignore events that exceed the size of 1 MiB
wl-clip-persist --clipboard regular --selection-size-limit 1048576
This option can be used to limit the memory usage or to avoid blocking the main thread by reading the data for too long.
Default: disabled
With --interrupt-old-clipboard-requests old clipboard requests will be interrupted when the clipboard has been updated. In other words, before reading the new clipboard contents we make sure to interrupt sending the old clipboard to other programs and wait until the interrupt has finished. This option might be useful in combination with the selection size limit to limit the memory usage, because the old clipboard can be dropped from the memory after the interrupt has finished.
You can modify the log level to see more of what is going on, e.g.
RUST_LOG=trace wl-clip-persist --clipboard regular
- Install
rustupto get therustcompiler installed on your system. Install rustup - Rust version 1.61.0 or later is required
- Install dependencies:
- wayland
- wayland-protocols (compile-time dependency)
- pkg-config (compile-time dependency)
- Build in release mode:
cargo build --release - The resulting executable can be found at
target/release/wl-clip-persist
- wl-clipboard-rs for showing how to interact with the Wayland clipboard
- wezterm for the initial read and write functions with timeouts