• Getting Started
• Search The History
• Settings
• Action Settings
• History Settings
• About Clipman
• Latest Release
• Source Code Repository
• Reporting Bugs

Clipman is a clipboard manager for Xfce. It keeps the clipboard contents around while it is usually lost when you close an application. It is able to handle text and images, and has a feature to execute actions on specific text by matching them against regular expressions.

In X11 (all Unix platforms) there are by default two clipboards to exchange any data between the windows. A default clipboard which is modified by manual copies (for instance when you select a file and press the copy button), and there is a primary clipboard which is modified by selections (for instance when you select text in a field).

Clipman manages both clipboards, either separately or synchronously, and may or may not add selections to its history.

Clipman is used to keep in history a list of clipboard contents and to restore them. The history is displayed in a menu by clicking on the main icon. Within the menu it is possible to restore a text and to clear the history.

Clipman menu
Shows the menu that popups when clicking the Clipman icon in the Xfce Panel or the notification area

There are two ways to run Clipman. You can select Clipman in the applications menu under the category Utility or type xfce4-clipman on the command-line, or you can add it into your panel. To add a new item in the panel right click the panel and select Add new item….

Clipman provides the command-line tool xfce4-popup-clipman. When called it popups the main menu. The command is practical for the Application Shortcuts available at Xfce Menu → Settings → Keyboard.

If you want to search the history of your clipboard, you can click on “Show full history…” in the menu or use the command-line tool xfce4-clipman-history which

• shows the complete history
• supports (fuzzy) type-ahead search
• supports paste-on-activate (i.e. pastes the selected text directly into the previously active window on hitting “return”)
• allows the user to switch from paste-on-activate to regular copying by holding down the Ctrl key

Clipman menu
Clipman history dialog, shown by running xfce4-clipman-history or by clicking on the menu entry

The settings dialog is available under the “Clipman settings…” item in the right click context menu on the main icon. It allows to tweak the history and to edit actions.

The following table describes the available options in the Behavior tab of the Settings dialog.

Clipman Settings (Behavior)
Settings dialog with the Behavior tab

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An action is a pair of a name and a regular expression. Each action can have one or more commands. The support of actions is optional and can be enabled or disabled through the Enable automatic actions option.

To add an action click the Add icon, to edit an action select the action and click the Edit icon or double click the action, and to remove an action select an action and click the Delete icon. By adding or editing an action a new dialog is opened.

To learn more about actions go to section Action Dialog.

Clipman Settings (Actions)
Settings dialog with the Actions tab

An action has a human readable name that describes the pattern it is going to match. An action must have at least one command which also has a human readable name. The matched text can be reused in the command.

The actions are always matched against text selections unless specified otherwise. When the box Activate only on manual copy instead of selection is checked, the action will be matched from the default clipboard (e.g. with Ctrl-C).

Action Dialog
Settings dialog showing the Action Dialog when creating or editing an action

Basic special characters: “.?+*(|)[]\”.

• “.”: represents a single character.
• “?+*”: respectively means zero or one character, one or more characters, and zero or more characters.
• “(|)”: used for grouping and substitution, the vertical bar is used as an OR operation.
• “[^]”: used to match a character from a set of characters and special characters, the circumflex is used at the start as a negation.
• “\”: escapes a special character.

Basic alphanumeric character class: “A-Za-z0-9”. Character classes are used within square brackets to represent a set of characters.

Regular expression examples:

• “bug ?#?[0-9]+”: text “bug”, zero or one space, zero or one sharp character, and one or more numbers.
• “(http|ftp).+\.(jpg|png|gif)”: text “http” or “ftp”, one or more character, a point, and the text “jpg”, “png” or “gif”.
• “http://.{120}[^ ]+”: text “http://”, 120 characters, and one or more characters except a space.

External resources:

• Wikipedia article about regular expressions.

A command can reuse one or more substitutions from the regular expression. The substitutions are represented by “\<number>” where <number> corresponds to the sub-pattern within parentheses or 0 for the complete text.

For example, from the simple pattern “bug #(123)” it is possible to use “\0” for the text “bug #123” and “\1” for the text “123”. With the command “exo-open http://host/\1”, the real executed command would be “exo-open http://host/123”.

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Clipman uses Xfconf to store its settings. That allows you to change the settings with the tool xfconf-query or xfce4-settings-editor. The channel where Clipman stores its settings is xfce4-panel and the base property is /plugins/clipman. The following table lists all the properties with their possible values.

To change a setting from a terminal type the following command-line:

xfconf-query -c xfce4-panel -p /plugins/clipman/property -s value

To list all settings type this command (the table above may be out of date):

xfconf-query -c xfce4-panel -lv | grep /plugins/clipman

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Clipman was written by Eduard Roccatello and then maintained by Nick Schermer and rewritten by Mike Massonnet. Nowadays it is maintained by the Xfce development team.

This software is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110, USA.

• xfce4-clipman-plugin 1.6.6 released (2024/02/29 15:50)

Read the CHANGELOG

• Download current release (link also contains older versions)

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https://gitlab.xfce.org/panel-plugins/xfce4-clipman-plugin

• Reporting Bugs – Open bug reports and how to report new bugs

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