yankit 0.4.0

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

• Interactive TUI — Browse, search, and copy entries with keyboard navigation
• Partial Selection — Select and copy specific parts of text in the detail view
• 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. Browse with the Interactive TUI

The primary way to use yankit is through its interactive interface. Simply running yankit without any arguments will launch the TUI, where you can navigate your history, preview long texts, and copy entries back to your clipboard.

# Launch the interactive browser
yankit

# Launch the interactive browser with a pre-filled search query
yankit search "password"

# (Optional) Alias for simply running `yankit`
yankit list

Keybindings:

Key	Action
↑ / ↓	Navigate between entries / scroll text
c	Copy highlighted entry (or selection if in detail view)
Enter / →	Open detail panel / Focus content
← / Escape	Return to list / Close search
TAB / Shift+TAB	Cycle focus between Search, List, and Detail
Enter / ↓	Jump to results (when in search)
Alt + ← / →	Switch focus directly between List and Detail
s	Open search
d	Delete highlighted entry
r	Refresh entries
q	Quit

3. Check watcher status / stop it

yankit status
yankit stop

4. View statistics

yankit stats

5. Export history

yankit export
yankit export --output history.json

6. 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