yankit 0.1.1

A clipboard history manager for your terminal. Track, search, and manage everything you copy.

yankit

A clipboard history manager for your terminal.
Yank it, track it, find it.

Features

• Watch — Monitor your clipboard in real-time (foreground or daemon mode)
• List — View your clipboard history with timestamps and word counts
• Search — Find anything you've copied with highlighted results
• Stats — See statistics about your clipboard usage
• Copy back — Re-copy any past entry back to your clipboard
• Export — Export your clipboard history as JSON
• Prune — Auto-cleanup old entries to keep your database lean
• Daemon mode — Run in background with stop and status commands

Installation

With uvx (recommended, no install needed)

uvx yankit watch

With uv

uv tool install yankit

With pip

pip install yankit

Quick Start

1. Start watching your clipboard

# Foreground mode (Ctrl+C to stop)
yankit watch

# Background daemon mode
yankit watch --daemon

2. Check watcher status / stop it

yankit status
yankit stop

3. View your clipboard history

yankit list
yankit list --today
yankit list --limit 50

4. Search through history

yankit search "password"
yankit search "https://"

5. View statistics

yankit stats

6. Re-copy an old entry

yankit copy 42

7. Show full content of an entry

yankit show 42

8. Export history

yankit export
yankit export --output history.json

9. Cleanup

# Delete entries older than 30 days
yankit prune --older-than 30

# Delete all history
yankit clear

How It Works

yankit polls your system clipboard every 0.5 seconds and stores new entries in a local SQLite database. It deduplicates consecutive copies and enforces a configurable maximum entry limit (default: 10,000) to prevent unbounded growth.

yankit watch ──► polls clipboard ──► new content? ──► store in SQLite
                   every 0.5s              │
                                    same as last? ──► skip

Database Location

All data is stored locally at ~/.yankit/history.db. No data is ever sent anywhere.

Database Size Management

• Max entries limit: yankit watch --max-entries 5000
• Age-based pruning: yankit prune --older-than 30 (days)
• Full reset: yankit clear
• Monitor size: yankit stats shows current DB size

Platform Support

Platform	Status	Notes
macOS	✅	Uses pbcopy/pbpaste (pre-installed)
Linux	✅	Requires xclip or xsel

Linux Prerequisites

# Debian/Ubuntu
sudo apt-get install xclip

# Arch
sudo pacman -S xclip

# Fedora
sudo dnf install xclip

Development

git clone https://github.com/oktaysabak/yankit.git
cd yankit

uv sync
uv run yankit --help

License

MIT