xclip-json

@readwithai - X - blog - machine-aided reading - 📖⚡️🖋️

xclip-json is a command-line utility for Linux that dumps all the different targets on the X clipboard into a machine-readable JSON format. This is a wrapper around xclip. It is useful for saving and restoring the entire clipboard for debugging purposes.

This tool requires xclip command-line utility, which is a required package.

You can install xclip on most Debian/Ubuntu-based systems with:

sudo apt-get install xclip

Installlation

You can install xclip-json using pipx:

pipx install xclip-json

Usage

You can run the command like so:

xclip-json

This outputs the contents of all targets and selection to the clipboards.

Here is some example output:

{
  "CLIPBOARD": {
    "STRING": "This is some plain text from the clipboard.",
    "UTF8_STRING": "This is some plain text from the clipboard.",
    "text/plain;charset=UTF-8": "This is some plain text from the clipboard.",
    "image/png": "iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAEAAAABCAQAAAC1HAwCAAAAC0lEQVR42mNkYAAAAAYAAjCB0C8AAAAASUVORK5CYII="
  }
}

You can then use tools such as jq to query the data. The following command is particularly useful for this:

xclip-json | jq .CLIPBOARD | jq 'keys'

Alternatives and prior work

While I could find no tool like xclip-json you can use xclip to manually list all targets on the clipboard like so: xclip -o -t TARGETS. You can then fetch a specific target with xclip -o -t $TARGET.

About me

I am @readwithai. I create tools for reading, research and agency sometimes using the markdown editor Obsidian.

I also create a stream of tools that are related to carrying out my work.

I write about lots of things - including tools like this - on X. My blog is more about reading and research and agency.