shared-clipboard

Share X11 clipboards over the network

Rationale

I often have 2 laptops running side-by-side, and I sometimes want to communicate tiny bits of text between them. I've imagined being able to share copy buffers between computers over the network for a while, and I finally did it today. 2022-02-08.

I made a post after I wrote this to see how other people would solve this problem, and I got some interesting solutions. I probably should have asked first before coding my own shared clipboard, but it was fun.

>>>/g/85602897

Prerequisites

• clipnotify (compile and install)
• ncat
• xsel
• perl

Installation

sudo apt install -y libxfixes-dev ncat libjson-perl xsel
git clone https://github.com/cdown/clipnotify.git
cd clipnotify
make
cp clipnotify ~/.local/bin/
cd ..
git clone https://git.coom.tech/gg1234/shared-clipboard.git
cd shared-clipboard
cp cn-loop shared-clipboard-hub shared-clipboard ~/.local/bin/

Usage

Choose one machine to act as a hub for everyone.

# Assume its IP is 192.168.1.3 for our example.
shared-clipboard-hub 7777

Every client that wants to share their clipboard should run something like this.

shared-clipboard 192.168.1.3 7777

You need at least 2 clients to make this meaningful. To see it in action, start copying text.