jot 📋

A lightweight clipboard history manager for the terminal. Tracks everything you copy — text and images — so you never lose something you copied 10 minutes ago.

Features

• Saves clipboard history automatically in the background
• Supports both text and images
• Images auto-expire from /tmp/jot/ on reboot — no clutter
• Deduplicates entries by content hash
• Simple, fast commands you'll actually use daily

⚠️ Privacy Notice

jot stores your full clipboard history including any sensitive data (passwords, tokens, auth codes). The database at ~/.jot/history.db is unencrypted. Don't use on shared machines without understanding this.

Installation

git clone https://github.com/yourusername/jot.git
cd jot
pip install -e .

Then start the daemon:

jot daemon start

Usage

jot ls                  # show last 20 clipboard entries
jot ls --n 50           # show last 50 entries
jot get <n>             # copy entry #n back to clipboard
jot search <query>      # search text history
jot clear               # wipe all history

Daemon

jot daemon start        # start background clipboard watcher
jot daemon stop         # stop the watcher
jot daemon status       # check if running

How it works

jot daemon start forks a background process that polls your clipboard every 500ms. New entries are saved to a local SQLite database at ~/.jot/history.db.

• Text entries are stored directly in the DB, capped at 500
• Image entries are saved as PNGs to /tmp/jot/, path stored in DB, capped at 50. If an image has expired, jot ls shows [image expired]

Project Structure

jot/
├── jot.py        # CLI entrypoint and all commands
├── daemon.py     # background clipboard watcher
├── storage.py    # SQLite wrapper
└── setup.py      # package config

Requirements

• Python 3.8+
• click
• rich
• pyperclip
• Pillow

License

MIT