goclip

Description

Command-line application to share the contents of your clipboard with people on your local area network (LAN).

The application can work in both send and receive mode.

Working modes

send
- Multicasts clipboard contents to 239.0.0.0:9999 on all interfaces by default (can specify which interface(s) to use. See Usage)
- If the size exceeds a single UDP datagram (8k), tell peers to initiate a TCP connection. TCP handler is started on tcp/30099
receive
- Listen for multicast messages and once one is received parse it's contents and type (text or image) and store it in the clipboard
- If the size of the content is too big, initiate a TCP connection to the sender to receive the contents that way

Requirements

This app uses go bindings for GTK3. It's needed in order to store anything else but text in the clipboard. The gtk package requires the cairo, glib, and gdk packages as dependencies.

Here is how to install these packages on some popular distros:

Ubuntu/Debian

Ubuntu uses the GTK 3.10 release. Also, some required packages may be missing. You may need to install the first or all of these packages in Ubuntu before gotk3:

$ sudo apt install libgtk-3-dev libcairo2-dev libglib2.0-dev

Fedora

$ sudo dnf install gtk3-devel cairo-devel glib-devel

Alpine

$ sudo apk add gtk+3.0-dev cairo-dev glib-dev

Arch

There's already source codes in binary packages. So, by installing gtk3 you are also getting dev-part of it.

Anything else

If you are using anything else, see the installation instructions here.

Installation

From a precompiled binary from the Releases page

From an RPM from here

From source with Golang installed

GO111MODULE=on go get -u github.com/viktorbarzin/goclip

Usage

╰─$ goclip -h
NAME:
   goclip - Multicast clipboard contents over the network

USAGE:
   goclip [global options] command [command options] [arguments...]

DESCRIPTION:
   Application to share your clipboard over a LAN. The content is multicasted to 239.0.0.0:9999. If the content exceeds the maximum UDP datagram size of 8192 bytes then peer-to-peer TCP connection is initialized and content is send over it instead.

COMMANDS:
   send     send clipboard contents
   receive  receive clipboard contents
   help, h  Shows a list of commands or help for one command

GLOBAL OPTIONS:
   --help, -h  show help (default: false)

To send clipboard:

╰─$ goclip send -h
NAME:
   goclip send - send clipboard contents

USAGE:
   goclip send [command options] [arguments...]

OPTIONS:
   -t value, --timeout value    Seconds for which the application will be performing the action (send, receive). After this exit. (default: 60)
   -i value, --interface value  Interface to multicast on. Can be specified multiple times. (default: "all")
   --help, -h                   show help (default: false)

To receive clipboard:

╰─$ goclip receive -h
NAME:
   goclip receive - receive clipboard contents

USAGE:
   goclip receive [command options] [arguments...]

OPTIONS:
   -t value, --timeout value  Seconds for which the application will be performing the action (send, receive). After this exit. (default: 60)
   --help, -h                 show help (default: false)

Examples

Just send your clipboard:

goclip send

The application enumerates all network interfaces and starts multicasting on each for a period of 60 seconds.

Multicast on some interfaces

Multicast on 1 interface

goclip send -i eth0

You can specify multiple interfaces with

goclip send -i eth0 -i wlan0

Change multicast duration

You can change the time for which your clipboard will be multicasted.

goclip send -t <seconds int>

Receive shared clipboard

goclip receive

The application takes care for initiating a TCP connection if the content size is too big.

Currently can receive text and images. GIF support would be good to have but currently not implemented.

Receive for some period

Similarly to the send -t you can use receive -t to change the time the app will wait for contents. The receive command exists either upon receiving clipboard content or after the timeout is reached (default 60)

goclip receive -t <seconds int>

Known issues

GIFs send only 1 image instead of the whole animation

Possible extensions

Utilize MDNS/Zeroconf to discover peers
Use only peer-to-peer TCP instead of multicast
Encrypt clipboard contents

ViktorBarzin/goclip