Clipboard Manager in uLauncher (Ubuntu GNOME Wayland)

I was surprised by how useful it’s to have a Clipboard Manager support in Raycast in my MacOS setup, so this is my attempt to have the same behavior in Ubuntu Linux, using GNOME with Wayland.

I was surprised by how useful Clipboard Manager support in Raycast is on MacOS, so now I’m trying to get the same functionality on Ubuntu with GNOME and Wayland.

Requirement: uLauncher.

Install GPaste:

sudo apt install gpaste-2

Install the Clipboard uLauncher Extension: https://ext.ulauncher.io/-/github-friday-ulauncher-clipboard

In the Extension settings, I did the following changes:

• Clipboard Manage: selected GPaste
• Copy keyword: changed to cl

Now when I run uLauncher I type cl and I can select an item from the clipboard history, or type some words to filter the history to narrow down the items. Once an item is selected, I can paste it with Ctrl+v.

What didn’t work?

Automatically pasting when selecting a history item

I thought this would be simple, but after checking the Clipboard extension docs on Copy hook and doing more research, I realized it’s not so simple and could lead to security risks.

I tried using wtype, but I got an error Compositor does not support the virtual keyboard protocol. I also found some other alternatives, but I didn’t test them yet: libei, wlrctl and ydotool.

GPaste primary selection setting

I tried enabling Primary selection affects history and Synchronize clipboard with primary selection under Clipboard synchronization, but they messed with my copying and pasting links in WordPress, so I left them off.

CopyQ

I started using CopyQ, but for some reason the clipboard history feature wouldn’t work for me.