clip-paste

Auto-pasting clipboard manager applet for the COSMIC desktop (Pop!_OS 24.04+).

clip-paste keeps a history of what you copy and, when you pick an entry, pastes it straight at the cursor of the window you were just in — no manual Ctrl+V.

Scope: clip-paste is a COSMIC panel applet, not a standalone app. It runs only on the COSMIC desktop environment. It is not for GNOME, KDE, or X11.

Features

• Clipboard history for text and images
• Auto-paste at cursor on select — selecting an entry copies it, dismisses the popup, and synthesizes a paste into the previously focused window (clip-paste addition; toggleable, on by default; image entries are copied but not auto-pasted)
• Pinned entries persist across restarts and reboots
• Unpinned history is runtime-only (never written to disk)
• Keyboard navigation — arrows or k/j to move rows, h/l between row actions (copy, preview, pin, delete), Enter to activate, Esc to close
• In-popup Settings — max history / max pinned / max image size / max image dimensions, plus the paste-on-select toggle
• Search across history

Requirements

• COSMIC desktop environment (e.g. Pop!_OS 24.04+).

• The compositor must expose these Wayland protocols:

  • wlr-data-control (clipboard access) — on some COSMIC builds you may need to enable it with COSMIC_DATA_CONTROL_ENABLED=1, e.g. via a drop-in in /etc/environment.d/ (then log out and back in).
  • wlr-layer-shell
  • zwp_virtual_keyboard

• wtype and wl-clipboard installed:

  sudo apt install wtype wl-clipboard

Install

From the .deb release

Download the .deb from the Releases page and install it:

sudo apt install ./clip-paste_*_amd64.deb

Then add the applet to your panel: Settings → Desktop → Panel → Applets and add clip-paste.

Build from source

Needs a Rust toolchain and just.

git clone https://github.com/ajithakdev/clip-paste.git
cd clip-paste
just build
sudo just install

Add it to the panel as above.

Usage

Click the clip-paste icon in the panel to open the history popup, then click (or press Enter on) an entry. With Paste on select enabled, focus returns to your previous window and the entry is pasted at the cursor.

Configuration

Config is stored at ~/.config/clip-paste/config.toml (or $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/clip-paste/config.toml), overridable with CLIP_PASTE_CONFIG.

Pinned entries are stored as app state so they survive restarts and reboots; only pinned entries are persisted. By default pinned history lives at $XDG_STATE_HOME/clip-paste/pinned-history.toml (or ~/.local/state/clip-paste/pinned-history.toml), overridable with CLIP_PASTE_PINNED_HISTORY.

Attribution

clip-paste is a fork of k33wee/clippy-land, licensed under GPL-3.0-or-later. All original work is © k33wee.

Changes made in this fork (© 2026 ajithakdev), documented in CHANGES.md:

• Auto-paste at cursor on item-select (via wtype).
• Removed the broken layer-surface --toggle path (fixed a cosmic_corner_radius protocol crash); --toggle is now a no-op.
• Hardened the image thumbnail render path against a renderer pixmap-allocation crash.
• Renamed the app ID, binary references, and config/state paths to clip-paste.

License

GPL-3.0-or-later. Copyright © k33wee and © 2026 ajithakdev.