pbi

What is this?

pbi copies stdin to the pasteboard when stdin is piped or redirected. When stdin is a terminal, it pastes the current pasteboard content.

Advanced

An image-aware version of pbcopy and pbpaste for macOS.

Pbcopy/paste gets/sets information on the clipboard from the terminal. They're pretty handy! They don't handle images though. So you can't right click, copy image, and then paste that contents in the terminal.

With pbi, you can.

While we're at it, pbcopy and pbpaste can be combined into one utility that detects if you're reading or writing to it.

Installing

From crates.io:

cargo install pbi --locked

From a checkout:

cargo install --path . --locked

Usage

Right click on an image in your web browser, copy image, and then your terminal, do:

pbi > nyan.jpg

or

pbi > nyan.png

Also you can do

cat nyan.png | pbi

or 

pbi < nyan.png

if you prefer

If you use a modern terminal that has Kitty graphics protocol or sixel support, with an image on your paste board you can do:

pbi

and the image will display directly in your terminal.

If you override TERM and terminal image auto-detection fails, force the protocol explicitly:

export PBI_IMAGE_PROTOCOL=sixel