yankout

A Wayland clipboard manager built in the dmenu tradition. A minimal GTK window lets you drag entries out to any destination, and a copied file path leaves as a real file drop. It also fills the role of a regular clipboard manager: search your history, recall an entry to the active clipboard.

When working in the terminal or in TUI apps like yazi and fzf, feeding a file into a GUI app such as a browser or editor is tedious. yankout lets the clipboard bridge that gap: copy the file path, open yankout, and drag the entry out of the window into the destination. The other direction works too: an image or text sitting in the clipboard becomes a file in the current directory with one command.

Usage

yankout              open the history window
yankout --current    show a puck that drags the live clipboard out
yankout list         print history as <id>TAB<preview> lines, newest first
yankout decode [id]  write one entry's raw content to stdout
yankout save [id]... write entries to files, named by time and type
yankout save --current   write the live clipboard to a file
yankout watch        record clipboard history; run once per session

--to <path>          save into this directory, or to this file (default: cwd)

--css <file>         load CSS on top of the default theme
--backend <name>     force the history backend (native or cliphist)

In the history window, type to filter, Enter or double-click to recall, and the whole window drags the selected entry. It closes on Esc, focus loss, or a completed drop. The puck survives focus loss and makes any terminal program a drag source:

echo ~/report.pdf | wl-copy && yankout --current

Paths to existing files are dragged as text/uri-list plus text/plain, so file managers and browsers take the file while text fields take the path string. Binary content goes out under its sniffed type, everything else as plain text.

Installation

Requires a GTK4-capable Wayland session and wl-clipboard.

cargo install yankout

Spawn yankout watch, the history recorder, on session startup and bind yankout to a key. The windows are fixed-size, which niri and sway float on their own; compositors without that heuristic need a float rule matching the app-ids dev.yankout.list and dev.yankout.puck. niri examples are in contrib/niri.kdl.

History

yankout watch is yankout's own clipboard watcher. It hears every copy directly from the compositor over the data-control protocol and records it under $XDG_DATA_HOME/yankout/history: newest first, deduplicated, capped at 750 entries, and offers marked x-kde-passwordManagerHint are never stored, keeping password managers out of history. On compositors without data-control, cliphist fills in if installed. The history is also readable from the terminal, in cliphist's shape so existing pickers switch by renaming the command:

yankout list        # <id>TAB<preview> per line, newest first
yankout decode 42   # raw content of one entry
yankout list | fuzzel --dmenu | yankout decode | wl-copy

Saving to disk

A GUI file manager turns a pasted image into a file; a terminal file manager cannot, and neither can a terminal receive a drop. save is that paste: the live clipboard, or any history entry, written to the current directory (or --to a directory or file path) and named by the moment it was copied and its sniffed type, clip_2026-09-18_12-17-25.png. Text becomes .txt; png, jpeg, gif and webp keep their type. Nothing is ever overwritten, and every path written is printed. Ids can be piped in one per line, so a multi-selection saves in one go:

yankout save --current                  # the clipboard, into the cwd
yankout save 42 --to ~/Pictures/shot.png
yankout list | fzf --multi | yankout save

In yazi, a key that runs yankout save --current is Ctrl+V for the clipboard; contrib/yazi-keymap.toml has that and an fzf picker over history.

Theming

The built-in theme is neutral monospace and follows the GTK light and dark preference. Everything customizable is GTK CSS in ~/.config/yankout/style.css; --css <file> tries a theme without installing it. contrib/warm.css is a commented starting point that lists the stylable nodes.

License

Licensed under either of Apache License, Version 2.0 or MIT license at your option. Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.