The Klipper Handbook Copyright © 2000-2003 Philip Rodrigues
Klipper is the Plasma clipboard cut & paste utility.
Table of Contents
IntroductionKlipper is the Plasma clipboard utility. It stores clipboard history, and allows you to link clipboard contents to application actions. Please report any problems or feature requests to KDEs bugzilla.
Using KlipperYou can use Klipper in the systemtray either as Plasma widget or classic application. Both share the same functionality but have a different GUI and show the last item of the history when hovering the Klipper icon in the systemtray:
The Klipper widget is hidden if the clipboard is empty.
To display the clipboard history, click on the Klipper icon in the systemtray.
Hover an entry with the mouse pointer and four icons appear which enable you to invoke an action, show the barcode, edit the content or remove the entry from the history. Use Spectacle to capture the barcodes and save them.
You can search through the clipboard history by opening it (click on Klipper) and typing your query. The results are updated as you type. To clear the clipboard history click on the icon at the right of the search field.
The Configure Clipboard... action in the context menu opens the settings dialog.
ActionsKlipper can perform actions on the contents of the clipboard, based on whether they match a particular regular expression. For example, any clipboard contents starting with “http://” can be passed to Firefox or Konqueror as URLs to open. In addition, if the contents matches a path, similar actions can be performed according to the file's type. e.g., if the path to a PDF file is copied to the clipboard, the file can be viewed in Okular.
To use this feature, just select a URL or path. If there is a matching regular expression in Klipper's list, a menu will appear showing you the programs for your selection. Use the mouse or cursor keys to select a program, and Klipper will run this program, opening the address pointed to by the selection.
If you do not want to perform any actions on the clipboard contents, select on the pop-up menu to return to what you were doing before. If you leave the menu, it will disappear, leaving you to continue your work. You can change the time that the menu remains for in the settings dialog, with the option Show action popup menu under the General page. You can separately disable the file path part using the option Include MIME actions under the Action Menu page.
Actions can be disabled completely by pressing the shortcut Ctrl+Alt+X.
Clipboard contents which match a regular expression can also be edited before performing an action on them. Select at the right of the clipboard entry, and you can change the clipboard contents in the dialog which appears, before clicking the button to run the appropriate action.
Pressing Ctrl+Alt+R shows the pop-up menu to repeat the last action which Klipper performed.
Clipboard/Selection BehaviorKlipper can be used to set the behavior of the clipboard and selection in Plasma.
Note
The X Window System® uses two separate clipboard buffers: the “selection” and the “clipboard”. Text is placed in the selection buffer by simply selecting it, and can be pasted with the middle mouse button. To place text in the clipboard buffer, select it and press Ctrl+X or Ctrl+C. Text from the clipboard buffer is pasted using Ctrl+V or by selecting in a context menu.
In order to change clipboard/selection behavior, select from the Klipper context menu, and in the dialog box that appears, select the General page. Unchecking Selection and Clipboard makes the clipboard and selection function as completely separate buffers as described above. With this option set, the option Ignore will prevent Klipper from including the contents of the selection in its clipboard history and from performing actions on the contents of the selection. Selecting Selection and Clipboard causes the clipboard and selection buffers to always be the same, meaning that text in the selection can be pasted with either the mouse button or the key combination Ctrl+V, and similarly for text in the clipboard buffer.
Configuring Klipper- Selection and Clipboard
When text or an area of the screen is highlighted with the mouse or keyboard, this is the selection. It can be pasted using the middle mouse button.
If the selection is explicitly copied using a or action, it is saved to the clipboard. It can be pasted using a action.
When turned on this option keeps the selection and the clipboard the same, so that any selection is immediately available to paste by any means. If it is turned off, the selection may still be saved in the clipboard history (subject to the options below), but it can only be pasted using the middle mouse button.
- Clipboard history
Toggles clipboard history.
- Number of entries
Sets the number of items that are stored in the clipboard history.
- Text selection
When an area of the screen is selected with mouse or keyboard, this is called the “selection”. This option determines whether text selections are saved in the clipboard history. It is possible to choose between Always save in history and Only when explicitly copied. The Always save in history option is not available if selection/clipboard synchronisation is turned off ‐ in this case the selection is never automatically saved in the clipboard history. See the section called “Clipboard/Selection Behavior”.
- Non-text selection
This option determines whether non-text selections (such as images) are saved in the clipboard history. It is possible to choose between Always save in history, Only when explicitly copied, and Never save in history. The Always save in history option is not available if selection/clipboard synchronisation is turned off ‐ in this case the selection is never automatically saved in the clipboard history. See the section called “Clipboard/Selection Behavior”.
Action Menu- Show action popup menu
Set the time that a popup menu will remain for if you do nothing with it.
- Replay actions on an item selected from history
If this is switched on, selecting an item from the history causes Klipper to display the actions pop-up on that item, if appropriate.
Brings up the Disable Actions for windows of type WM_CLASS dialog.
Some programs, such as Konqueror, use the clipboard internally. If you get unwanted Klipper pop-ups all the time when using a certain application, do the following:
Open the application.
From a terminal, run
xprop | grepand then click on the window of the application you are running.WM_CLASSThe first string after the equals sign is the one to enter.
Once the WM_CLASS is added, no more actions will be generated for windows of that application.
- Remove white space when executing actions
If selected, any white space (spaces, tabs, etc.) at the beginning and end of the clipboard contents will be removed before passing the clipboard contents to an application. This is useful, for example, if the clipboard contains a URL with spaces which, if opened by a web browser, would cause an error.
- Include MIME actions
If selected, include applications that can accept its MIME type of a file name or URL selected in the popup menu.
Actions Configuration- Editing Expressions/Actions
On the Actions page, double-click the regular expression or action that you want to edit or select it and press the button. A dialog will appear in which the expression text can be edited as you wish.
- Adding Expressions/Actions
Click the button to add a regular expression for Klipper to match. Klipper uses Qt™'s
QRegularExpression, which uses PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular Expressions).You can add a description of the regular expression type (e.g. “HTTP URL”) by clicking in the Description column.
Note
You can find detailed information about the use of
QRegularExpressionregular expressions in the Qt upstream documentation.Edit the regular expression as described above. To add a command to execute, click and edit the command in an in-place text editing box. Double-clicking on a command allows you to edit it.
Note that %s in the command line is replaced with the clipboard contents, e.g. if your command definition is
kwrite %sand your clipboard contents are/home/phil/textfile, the commandkwritewill be run. To include %s in the command line, escape it with a backslash, as so:/home/phil/textfile\%s.Entries
%0through%9will be replaced by the corresponding captured texts from the match pattern.
Shortcuts OptionsThe shortcuts page allows you to change the keyboard shortcuts which are used to access Klipper functions. You can change the shortcut to one of three things:
- None
The selected action cannot be accessed directly from the keyboard
- Default
The selected action uses Klipper's default key. These are the shortcuts referred to in this manual.
- Custom
The selected action is assigned to the keys you choose.
To choose a custom key for the action you have selected, click on Custom and then None. Now type the desired key combination on your keyboard, as in any KDE application.
If you define a shortcut for Open Klipper at Mouse Position pressing this shortcut will open the Klipper popup menu at the position of the mouse cursor, instead of their default position (in the Plasma Panel). Useful if you use the mouse more than the keyboard.
Credits and LicenseKlipper
Program copyright 1998 Andrew Stanley-Jones (asj AT cban.com)
Program copyright 1998-2000 Carsten Pfeiffer (pfeiffer AT kde.org)
Currently maintained by Esben Mose Hansen. See http://mosehansen.dk/about for contact details.
Documentation copyright 2000-2003, 2005 Philip Rodrigues
(phil AT kde.org)
This documentation is licensed under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
This program is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.