cliphist-tui

Old name: shorinclip

A Wayland clipboard TUI with rich media (images/GIFs/videos, etc.) preview based on fzf wl-clipboard cliphist.

Use chafa for image preview, kitty icat for GIF preview when using native kitty, ffmpegthumbnailer for video thumbnail generation. In native kitty, PNG previews are sent to the terminal as a file path (kitty graphics protocol), so no decoding happens on our side.

Preview

Clipboard content	Preview
Image (binary / file / QQ / WeChat)	the image
Image copied from a browser (<img src="https://...">)	downloads and shows the image; Enter copies the full-size image itself
Video	thumbnail at 10% + resolution / duration / codec
PDF	first page + page count
Audio	embedded cover + title / artist / duration
Text / code file	syntax highlighted content
Directory	listing
Archive	file list
Multiple files	file list + preview of the first one
JSON text	pretty printed
Hex color (#ff8800)	color swatch

Optional dependencies

Everything below is optional: a feature turns on when its command is found in PATH, otherwise the preview falls back to plain text.

Package (Arch)	Command	Used for
ffmpeg	ffprobe, ffmpeg	video / audio info, audio cover
poppler	pdftoppm, pdfinfo	PDF preview
bat	bat	syntax highlighted text files
eza	eza	directory listing with icons
libarchive	bsdtar	archive listing (unzip is used as a fallback for zip)
jq	jq	JSON pretty printing
mpv	mpv	Ctrl+O/E opens videos in mpv

Showcase

• Ctrl+X delete selection

• Auto refresh when clipboard changed and Alt+X delete all

• Ctrl+E/O open videos or pictures from clipboard manager

Installation

yay -S cliphist-tui-git

For best image preview, a terminal which supports kitty image protocol is needed, such as kitty or ghostty, or you can let chafa handle image preview (maybe low quality).

For example:

• foot

  

• alacritty

  

Usage

Open cliphist daemon with this command:

wl-paste --watch cliphist store

When you copy an image in a browser, the browser offers both text/html and image/png, and wl-paste --watch without --type picks the HTML. cliphist-tui can still preview such an entry and copy the real image back (it downloads it), but if you want the image bytes stored in history directly, run an extra watcher for images:

wl-paste --type image --watch cliphist store

Don't start the watcher more than once (e.g. both from the compositor config and by hand in a terminal): every copy would then be stored by each of them.

Open the TUI with this command: cliphist-tui or shorinclip.

Then it just works.

Don't forget to set up autostart in your Wayland compositor's config file.

• Niri

  spawn-at-startup "wl-paste" "--watch" "cliphist" "store"
  // optional, see above
  spawn-at-startup "wl-paste" "--type" "image" "--watch" "cliphist" "store"
  

• Hyprland

  exec-once = wl-paste --watch cliphist store
  # optional, see above
  exec-once = wl-paste --type image --watch cliphist store
  

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