Module clipboard 

The clipboard: an internal register, the system clipboard behind it, and OSC 52 in front of both.

Why not a clipboard crate

X11 has no clipboard daemon. A selection is owned by a live process, and when that process exits the content is gone unless a clipboard manager happened to claim it. xclip and wl-copy fork a background process specifically to hold that ownership; a library that sets the selection from inside this process requires this process to stay alive to serve it. For an editor the failure is: copy, quit, paste elsewhere, get nothing.

Helix reaches for external commands for exactly this reason, citing Neovim’s provider/clipboard.vim; oh-my-pi does the same and keeps a PowerShell path on Windows. Three implementations agreeing is enough evidence.

The layers

1. The register. Always present, always the source of truth for paste inside TYPE. Nothing can make this fail.
2. OSC 52 on write, emitted first. An escape sequence carrying base64 that the local terminal intercepts, so a copy over SSH lands in the laptop’s clipboard rather than the server’s.
3. A command provider, chosen by environment variable and binary presence rather than by trying and catching.

Reading

There is no OSC 52 read. The reply has to be parsed off the input stream, and terminals disable clipboard reads by default for good reason — a remote host that can read your clipboard reads whatever you last copied. Reads go to the provider, then fall back to the register.

Failure

Nothing here surfaces an error. A headless box with no clipboard is a normal condition, not something to interrupt someone about.

Functions

enable_system

Let the clipboard reach the system. Called once, by the binary.

get

Paste: the system provider, falling back to the register.

provider_name

Which clipboard provider was chosen, for a log line.

register

What the register holds.

set

Copy: register, then OSC 52, then the system provider.

set_register

Set the register alone, touching nothing outside this process.