alpymist

ADR 0014

Copy and paste on Super, and a history kept only when asked

accepted View source

Context

Copy and paste differ by window: a terminal takes Ctrl+Shift+C and Ctrl+Shift+V, since Ctrl+C interrupts and Ctrl+V quotes the next key, and everything else takes Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V. On Wayland, what was copied belongs to the window that copied it, so it is gone when that window closes, and nothing remembers what was copied before.

A history fixes that, and keeps everything copied: passwords from a password manager, tokens pasted into a terminal, keys. ADR 0011 says nothing that keeps a secret in the clear is on by default.

Decision

Super+C, Super+X and Super+V work in every window. alpymist clipboard copy and paste ask Hyprland which window has the focus and send it the shortcut it understands. Terminals are known by their desktop entries (TerminalEmulator, matched to the window's class), not by a list here. Super+X sends Ctrl+X to anything but a terminal, which has nothing to cut and to which Ctrl+X is not harmless (nano exits on it); a terminal is sent nothing. Floating a window moves from Super+V to Super+Shift+F. The screenshot key puts the picture on the clipboard as well as in a file.

The history is off until Settings › Clipboard turns it on, and says what it keeps. When on:

  • It is our own small daemon, alpymist clipboard daemon, fed by wl-paste --watch. clipman, the one Alpine packages, always writes its history to a file, keeps only text, and cannot pin.
  • It is kept in memory, on a socket in the session's runtime directory. Only if Settings also says so is it kept across logins, in $XDG_STATE_HOME/alpymist/clipboard, readable by the account alone.
  • What a password manager marks as secret is never taken: wl-clipboard reports it (CLIPBOARD_STATE=sensitive), and the type x-kde-passwordManagerHint is checked too.
  • The lock screen has it forget all but pinned entries, unless Settings says to keep them. Pinned entries are the person's to forget.
  • Text up to 1 MiB and images up to 16 MiB are kept; the size in Settings bounds how many, pinned ones aside.

The picker is the menu: alpymist-menu clipboard, on Super+Shift+V. Enter pastes, Ctrl+S pins, Delete forgets.

Older accounts get the keys the theme's way (ADR 0007). The first change in Settings › Clipboard turns bind = SUPER, V, togglefloating, if still as shipped, into the four new keys, and the screenshot key into the one that copies. The file is kept beside it as hyprland.conf.bak-clipboard, and Hyprland is reloaded. If Super+C, Super+Shift+V or Super+Shift+F is already the account's own, nothing is changed. Super+X is added with them where it is free, and an account given the keys before Super+X existed gets it, after Super+C, the next time Settings › Clipboard is changed.

Consequences

  • Nothing is kept by default; turning the history on is a choice made on a page that says what it keeps.
  • An image in the picker is a line naming its size, not a picture of it yet.
  • A session's history dies with the session unless remembered, and a crash of the daemon loses it too.