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scoot — a grumpy ginger cat about to swat a window sidewaysscoot

Clipboard

Copy in one window, close it, and the paste still works: every copy lands in a history kept by cliphist, restorable with one keypress. Without this slot, a copy dies with the app that offered it, which reads as data loss. Agents move text through the clipboard constantly, so the profile turns it on.

configuration.nix and home.nix
programs.scoot.desktop = {
  enable = true;
  # A longer tail in a moved db:
  # clipboard.maxItems = 250;
  # clipboard.dbPath = "/home/you/.cache/cliphist-test/db";
  # No history at all on this box (each switch below is its own):
  # clipboard.enable = false;
};

What runs: two watcher units (regular clipboard and primary selection, in scoot-session.target, so no other desktop starts them), each a wl-paste --watch feeding one shared history, plus wl-copy/wl-paste on PATH. The history keeps 100 entries by default (oldest dropped first, each entry at most 5 MB), byte-for-byte: trailing newlines survive, and so do images. Press Super+v and the picker shows the newest first; Enter restores the picked entry to the clipboard, then paste as usual:

The clipboard history picker over the session: four entries, newest first and highlighted, in the music-desk paper and ink

Wayland selections are owner-held: the history survives the source app closing (and a reboot, since it lives in a db on disk), while the live selection still dies with its owner. So Ctrl+v right after closing the source finds nothing. Open the picker, press Enter, paste.

Password-manager copies never land in history: such an offer carries the x-kde-passwordManagerHint MIME type, for which the watcher stores nothing. Managers that do not set the hint are not excluded, so treat the history as sensitive-adjacent anyway. Try it: wl-copy --sensitive copies, and the history stays empty.

Over the session lock, two things happen: the history is wiped as the session locks (pre-lock copies never sit on disk behind the lock screen), and nothing copied during the lock is recorded. Without the idle policy there is no lock event, so a standalone clipboard wipes manually (cliphist wipe). The db lives at cliphist’s default (~/.cache/cliphist/db, honoring XDG_CACHE_HOME) unless dbPath moves it. It is on disk, so history survives reboots, and any process running as your user can read the db file. Password-manager copies never land there, the lock wipes it every lock, and wipe empties it any time. The db is not encrypted at rest.

Every value is an option, applied on rebuild/switch (the units restart into the new config; no re-login):

Option Type Default Meaning
desktop.clipboard.enable bool true with the profile keep history (two watcher units), wl-copy/wl-paste on PATH, the picker bind
desktop.clipboard.maxItems int (at least 1) 100 history entries kept, oldest dropped first
desktop.clipboard.dbPath string or null null (cliphist’s default) history db path: absolute, letters, digits and ._/+@- only; anything else fails evaluation
desktop.theme.targets.clipboard.enable bool true theme the picker from the look; false keeps the menu’s own style

Troubleshooting, by symptom:

  • Close the app and the paste is empty. That is the live selection, not the history: open the picker (Super+v), Enter on the entry, paste. If the picker is empty too, the watcher never stored it: systemctl --user status scoot-clipboard-store (and -primary-store), then cliphist list.
  • Super+v opens nothing. The slot renders that bind only with clipboard.enable beside the keymap (both on with the profile). Then check the menu: scootlaunch --dmenu from a terminal. With an empty history it exits at once, which is the picker staying quiet, not an error.
  • Escape clears my clipboard. It does not: a cancelled pick exits before wl-copy runs. If the selection changed anyway, another manager runs beside this one; only one watcher per selection should run.
  • A password is in the history. The offering app did not set the hint: delete it (cliphist list | scootlaunch --dmenu | cliphist delete, or wipe for all of it) and tell the app to set it.
  • Copies made while locked are in the history. The store entry’s probe failed open: check scoot-clipboard-store and the compositor’s socket. The wipe still ran at lock, so pre-lock entries are gone regardless.
  • Two pickers / two histories. Another manager runs beside this one; only one should. Turn this one off or uninstall the other.