Clipboard Notify

Motivation

I often try to copy some content, press ctrl + c and paste it somewhere else. But more than once I somehow haven’t pressed the copy button good enough or the copy button on a codeblock of a website is just broken or buggy and I paste the former content of my clipboard - which can be pretty awkward if I don’t realise it before sending.

Another example is with password managers, which clear the content of the clipboard after a few seconds - its good to be reminded when that happens.

To prevent that I thought about a small script which sends a short notification once the content of my clipboard changes.

The solution

I just wrote a short bash script which starts at login to my desktop and checks for the content of the clipboard every second. If it differs from the content of the previous iteration, it uses notify-send from libnotify to send a short notification.

#!/bin/bash

clip_content=""
while true; do
    tmp_content=$(wl-paste)
    if [ "$clip_content" != "$tmp_content" ]; then
        notify-send -t 750 "Clipboard" "New content copied to clipboard"
        clip_content=$tmp_content
    fi
    sleep 1
done

if you don’t run a wayland session, you need to replace the wl-paste command with the x11 equivalent.

I added it to my sway-config like

exec --no-startup-id $HOME/.config/sway/scripts/clipboard-spy.sh

and thats it. I run dunst for the notifications on my laptop - but every other notification utility should just work as good.

the bad

This programm runs constantly in the background and constantly writes the content of the clipboard into a variable. I don’t think thats a security issue (if someone or something can read the memory content of that tool - i am pretty sure it can also just read the content of your clipboard directly. And the resource consumption to run that script in the background is really low.