Crate wl_clipboard_rs

A safe Rust crate for working with the Wayland clipboard.

This crate is intended to be used by terminal applications, clipboard managers and other utilities which don't spawn Wayland surfaces (windows). If your application has a window, please use the appropriate Wayland protocols for interacting with the Wayland clipboard (wl_data_device from the core Wayland protocol, the primary_selection protocol for the primary selection), for example via the smithay-clipboard crate.

The protocol used for clipboard interaction is data-control from wlroots. When using the regular clipboard, the compositor must support the first version of the protocol. When using the "primary" clipboard, the compositor must support the second version of the protocol (or higher).

For example applications using these features, see src/bin/wl_copy.rs and src/bin/wl_paste.rs which implement terminal apps similar to wl-clipboard.

The Rust implementation of the Wayland client is used by default; use the native_lib feature to link to libwayland-client.so for communication instead. A dlopen feature is also available for loading libwayland-client.so dynamically at runtime rather than linking to it.

The code of the crate itself (and the code of the example utilities) is 100% safe Rust. This doesn't include the dependencies.

Examples

Copying to the regular clipboard:

use wl_clipboard_rs::copy::{MimeType, Options, Source};

let opts = Options::new();
opts.copy(Source::Bytes("Hello world!".as_bytes()), MimeType::Autodetect)?;

Pasting plain text from the regular clipboard:

use std::io::Read;
use wl_clipboard_rs::{paste::{get_contents, Error, MimeType, Seat}, ClipboardType};

let result = get_contents(ClipboardType::Regular, Seat::Unspecified, MimeType::Text);
match result {
    Ok((mut pipe, _)) => {
        let mut contents = vec![];
        pipe.read_to_end(&mut contents)?;
        println!("Pasted: {}", String::from_utf8_lossy(&contents));
    }

    Err(Error::NoSeats) | Err(Error::ClipboardEmpty) | Err(Error::NoMimeType) => {
        // The clipboard is empty or doesn't contain text, nothing to worry about.
    }

    Err(err) => Err(err)?
}

Modules

copy	Copying and clearing clipboard contents.
paste	Getting the offered MIME types and the clipboard contents.
utils	Helper functions.

Enums

ClipboardType

The clipboard to operate on.