yankit 0.4.3

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)
• 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 search through everything you've copied.

# Launch the interactive browser
yankit

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. Configuration

You can view and update your configuration directly from the CLI.

# View current config
yankit config view

# Update settings
yankit config set --max-entries 5000 --always-show-detail True

Available Settings

Setting	Default	Description
max_entries	10000	Maximum number of entries to keep in the database.
auto_prune_days	30	Number of days after which entries are automatically deleted.
enable_auto_prune	True	Whether to automatically prune old entries when the watcher is running.
always_show_detail	False	If True, the detail panel stays open in the TUI even when no entry is selected.
auto_start_watcher	True	Automatically start the background watcher when you open the TUI if it's not running.

5. View statistics

yankit stats

6. Export history

yankit export
yankit export --output history.json

7. 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 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. Your configuration is at ~/.yankit/config.json. No data ever leaves your machine.

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