36. Clipboard

What you copy with Ctrl+C stays available in amadeOS after you have copied something else, and even after the program you copied from has closed. The clipboard history keeps the last copies; the Clipboard page of Settings sets how many, and what else the clipboard does.

The clipboard history

Press Ctrl+Alt+V, or choose Clipboard History in the Tools drawer of the Front Panel. A window lists your last copies, the newest first: texts with their first line, pictures with their size, files with their number, and when you copied them.

To paste an older copy:

1. Choose it with the arrow keys or the mouse, and press Enter (or Copy). The digits 1 to 9 choose the first nine entries directly.
2. The window closes, and the copy is on the clipboard again.
3. Paste it with Ctrl+V where you want it.

Button	What it does
Copy	Puts the chosen entry on the clipboard.
Delete	Removes the chosen entry from the history; the Del key does the same.
Clear All	Removes every entry, after a question.
Close	Closes the window; Esc does the same.
Pause recording	While ticked, new copies are not kept. Useful before you copy something private.

The Clipboard control

Open Settings and click Clipboard (chapter 30).

Setting	What it does
Keep a history of copies	Turns the history on or off.
Keep the last … entries	How many copies the history keeps, from 5 to 100; 30 at first.
Clear History	Forgets everything in the history now.
Keep a copy on the clipboard when the program that made it closes	Without it, a copy disappears when you close the program you copied from, as on many Linux desktops. With it, the copy stays.
Also record selected text and put it on the clipboard	Linux has a second clipboard: text you select with the mouse can be pasted with the middle mouse button. With this setting, selected text also goes into the history and onto the normal clipboard.

Apply and Reset work as on every page.

Coming from Windows or macOS

Ctrl+Alt+V is what Win+V is on Windows. macOS has no clipboard history of its own.

Your data

The history is kept in memory only. It is never written to the disk and is gone when you log out. Copies that a password manager marks as secret are neither recorded nor kept.

Under the hood

The clipboard manager is part of amadeos-session and starts at login (/etc/amadeos/autostart.d/40-amadeos-clipboard). It notices every copy through the X extension XFixes and reads it at once. When the program that copied closes, the manager takes the clipboard over, so the copy can still be pasted. The settings are in ~/.config/amadeos/clipboard.conf; amadeos-clipboard opens the history window.