Winix.Clip 0.4.0

clip

Cross-platform clipboard bridge. Copy from stdin, paste to stdout, clear — with identical behaviour on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Install

Scoop (Windows)

scoop bucket add winix https://github.com/Yortw/winix
scoop install winix/clip

Winget (Windows, stable releases)

winget install Winix.Clip

.NET Tool (cross-platform)

dotnet tool install -g Winix.Clip

Direct Download

Download native binaries from GitHub Releases.

Usage

clip                     # paste clipboard contents to stdout
echo text | clip         # copy stdin to the clipboard
clip --clear             # empty the clipboard
clip -c                  # force copy mode
clip -p                  # force paste mode
clip -r                  # paste raw (preserve trailing newline)
clip --primary           # target PRIMARY selection (Linux X11/Wayland)

Examples

# Copy the output of a command
date | clip

# Paste into another command
clip | grep foo

# Clear after copying a secret
read -rs SECRET
echo -n "$SECRET" | clip
# ...paste where needed...
clip --clear

# Round-trip through a file
cat report.txt | clip
clip > report-copy.txt

Newline handling

Important. clip treats newlines asymmetrically by default:

• Copy is byte-preserving. echo foo | clip stores foo\n on the clipboard, exactly as stdin delivered it.
• Paste strips exactly one trailing \n (or \r\n). clip then prints foo without the newline.

Why? This matches $(...) shell-substitution semantics: result=$(clip) behaves like result=$(cat file) — no phantom trailing newline that breaks comparisons or concatenations.

Use --raw / -r on paste to disable the stripping and get exactly what is on the clipboard:

clip -r > out.bin     # byte-exact paste
clip | xxd            # may appear shorter than 'clip -r | xxd'

Mode auto-detection

The unified rule: with no input, clip pastes; with content on stdin, clip copies. This holds across every supported environment — interactive TTY, redirected pipe with content, redirected pipe with no content (e.g. Git Bash / MSYS / Cygwin where stdin reports redirected even interactively, or an explicit empty pipe like : | clip):

• Bare clip with a terminal stdin → paste
• Bare clip with redirected stdin that has content → copy
• Bare clip with redirected stdin that is empty → paste

Explicit -c / -p / --clear always override auto-detection. Modes are mutually exclusive: at most one of --copy, --paste, --clear. --raw only applies to paste — --raw combined with --copy or --clear is rejected with exit 125.

Scripting tip

The autodetect "no content = paste" rule is friendly for interactive use but ambiguous in scripts where a producer command may or may not output content. If your pipeline can produce empty output and you want deterministic copy behaviour:

producer | clip --copy     # always copies, even if 'producer' outputs nothing
producer | clip --paste    # always pastes, ignoring stdin entirely

The explicit flag is the escape hatch — it bypasses the autodetect entirely. Use clip --copy < /dev/null (or clip -c < /dev/null) when you specifically want to copy an empty string. clip --clear is the more idiomatic way to empty the clipboard.

Unicode and cmd.exe on Windows

clip stores text on the clipboard as UTF-16 (via CF_UNICODETEXT) and reads/writes stdin/stdout as UTF-8. Non-ASCII content (emoji, CJK, accented letters) round-trips correctly when the shell and terminal agree on UTF-8.

Legacy cmd.exe defaults to an OEM code page (usually 437 or 850). In that mode:

• Copy via pipe: echo 🌏 | clip does not work — echo itself replaces the emoji with ? before the bytes reach clip. Confirm with echo 🌏 > test.txt; type test.txt (no clip involved).
• Paste to terminal: clip writes UTF-8 bytes to stdout and sets its own stdio encoding to UTF-8 (code page 65001) for the duration of the call. This does not change the parent shell's persistent code page — the clipboard contents are correct, but rendering depends on whether the terminal itself is in UTF-8. If you're seeing mojibake after clip, run chcp 65001 once in your cmd.exe session to switch the terminal to UTF-8.

Fixes for cmd.exe emoji round-trip:

chcp 65001
echo 🌏 | clip.exe
clip.exe

Or use PowerShell 7+, Windows Terminal, or Git Bash — all three default to UTF-8. (Git Bash's stdin auto-detection is described in the Mode auto-detection section above.)

Copying via Ctrl+C from any GUI app (browser, Word, VS Code) into clip via paste always works — no shell is involved.

Options

Exit codes

Platform notes

• Windows. Native implementation via user32.dll P/Invoke. clip supersedes the built-in System32\clip.exe when earlier in PATH. Scoop installs place shims ahead of System32 automatically. For other install methods, ensure the install location precedes System32 in PATH. Old scripts that pipe into clip continue to work — ours is a strict superset of the Windows built-in (which is write-only).
• macOS. Shells out to the built-in pbcopy / pbpaste, which are always present. Text only in v1 — rich-type support (HTML, RTF, images) is planned for v2 via NSPasteboard.
• Linux. Auto-detects Wayland (via WAYLAND_DISPLAY) and prefers wl-copy / wl-paste. Falls back to xclip, then xsel. If none are installed, clip exits 127 with an install hint. On most desktop distributions one of these is pre-installed; on minimal server images you may need to install wl-clipboard, xclip, or xsel.

Colour

clip has no coloured output itself. The --color flag is accepted for suite consistency. NO_COLOR is respected.

See also

• man clip (after winix install man)
• clip --describe for JSON metadata