I recently switched from Gnome to i3 on my main laptop. So far, I'm enjoying the simplicity of piecing together my own desktop environment from small, specialized tools.
One thing I missed from Gnome was my clipboard history tool, Gpaste. I've come to expect that my previous dozen or more clipboard copies are a keystroke or two away and not lost forever.
While tweaking my i3 setup, I realized it would be possible to replicate some or even all of the functionality of GPaste using simple unix tools:
- Ruby (could be another scripting language, or just Bash script, but I'm more familiar with Ruby)
- xclip
- dmenu
An hour or so later, I had this:
Upon startup, my .xinitrc file starts up clipd, which checks the clipboard every second for a new string. (Note, this only works for textual data at the moment.) It stores the last 100 unique items in the .clipboard-history file in my home directory.
The other piece to this is my .i3/config file, which has a keybinding for win+v.
This opens up dmenu with all the available clips. Once a selection is made via dmenu, the clip is stored in the clipboard for pasting the usual way.
It's not overly clever or advanced, but it seems to work.
Happy hacking!