Merenda - Snack-sized clipboard syncronization over SSH

A tiny server/client application to synchronize clipboards over SSH written in Rust, inspired by similar tools like Lemonade.

Installation

First, install merenda using cargo on both your local machine (the one you'll use to SSH into other systems), and your remote machine (the one you SSH into).

cargo install merenda

1. Local machine

Run merenda server. It will listen for connections requesting to read/write your clipboard, and you'll generally want to have it running in the background. On its own, it also works as a roundabout way to read/write your clipboard, by using merenda get and merenda set on your local machine to connect to the server.

If you're using systemd, you can copy the provided user service to ~/.config/systemd/user, which you can activate with systemctl --user start merenda.service and enable at boot with systemctl --user enable merenda.service.

By default, the server will listen on 127.0.0.1, port 3660. You can change either with the -H/--address and -p/--port arguments.

CAUTION: Think carefully before changing the default listen address. Merenda has absolutely no authentication or encryption, so listening on anything other than loopback will allow anyone able to reach that IP address to read/write to your clipboard at will. A safer alternative is to forward the port over SSH, so that it's only exposed on the other end of the SSH connection. More on that later.

2. Remote machine

After installation, set up your preferred editors/tools to use merenda to access the clipboard when an SSH connection is available.

For example, I use NeoVim and my config looks like this:

if !empty($SSH_CONNECTION)
    set clipboard+=unnamed
    let g:clipboard= {
        \   'name': 'merenda',
        \   'copy': {
        \       '*': ['merenda', 'set'],
        \   },
        \   'paste': {
        \       '*': ['merenda', 'get'],
        \   },
        \   'cache_enabled': 1,
        \ }
endif

3. Forwarding over SSH

You can forward the port merenda is listening on to your remote host by adding a RemoteForward option to your ~/.ssh/config file.

For example:

Host myothercomputer
    User username
    RemoteForward 3660 localhost:3660
    Hostname 10.1.1.251

Now you can use merenda set and merenda get to read/write the clipboard on the remote host!

License