Clipman

Wayland-native clipboard history

Clip once.
Paste forever.

Clipman is a fast, GTK-native clipboard history manager for Ubuntu and GNOME on Wayland — with search, pinning, snippets, and a privacy mode that actually pauses recording.

Get Clipman View on GitHub
  • Snap Store38 territories
  • Ext #9407GNOME Shell extension
  • clipman-clipboardPyPI · AUR
  • 100%Wayland-native
The Clipman popup window with search field, filter tabs, pinned items and a day-grouped clipboard list

Live preview

Clipboard history shouldn't be a leap of faith.

Watch the whole flow — search, paste, pin, incognito — then flip through the real states yourself below. Both run right in this page; nothing to install.

Live mockup Click a state to swap the popup's contents.
Live preview, running right in this page. Click through the states to see how the popup adapts. Open the full design workspace →

By the numbers

Already running across 38 territories. On every channel that matters.

Live counts pulled straight from GitHub, the GNOME Extensions registry, and PyPI on page load. No analytics, no dashboards — just the public numbers anyone can verify.

GitHub stars
—
stargazers
Forks
—
github forks
Release downloads
—
github releases
GNOME extension
—
total installs
PyPI
—
downloads · last 30 days

What it actually does

Four habits, one keystroke.

The thing you copied yesterday is one keystroke away.

Super+V opens the popup. Type to search your text clips. Pin what you reuse. Save snippets with templates. Filter tabs split All, Text, Images, and Snippets.

The snippets editor mockup showing a searchable list on the left and an editor form on the right with monospace content and {{date}} variables

Detected secrets leave on their own.

Incognito mode pauses recording entirely. Labelled passwords, tokens, keys and card numbers are masked, and removed from the history after 30 seconds. The history file ships with restrictive permissions (0600) by default.

The popup in incognito mode showing a banner that recording is paused, with a Resume button

No polling. No flicker.

A GNOME Shell extension forwards clipboard events over D-Bus, so the daemon wakes only when you copy.

The Privacy preferences pane showing incognito switch, sensitive-data auto-clear toggle and timeout slider

Looks like the rest of your desktop, on purpose.

Catppuccin Mocha for dark, stone for light. Free-form accent and font colours, opacity 30–100 %, font size 8–20 px. Built on GTK and libadwaita with a single design-token system so the theme behaves identically on every surface.

The Appearance preferences pane with theme picker, accent swatches, opacity and font-size sliders

Polished states for the moments that matter.

Empty history, no-results, sensitive auto-cleared, first-run, extension missing, backup failed — every edge is intentional and consistent across the app, with a tone that never shouts.

The Storage preferences pane with the maximum-entries slider, live database stats, and backup/restore actions

Get Clipman

One command. Then Super+V.

Snap is the easiest on Ubuntu/GNOME. PyPI works on any distro with Python 3.10+. Arch users get a maintained AUR package. The .deb and .rpm builds ride the GitHub Releases page. 

sudo snap install clipman

Then install the GNOME Shell extension, and set up autostart and the shortcut: finish the setup. · snapcraft.io/clipman

FAQ

Questions you'd actually ask before installing.

What is Clipman?
A clipboard history manager for Linux desktops on Wayland. Press Super+V and a popup shows everything you've copied recently — text and images, searchable, pinnable, with reusable snippets. It runs as a local Python + GTK daemon and stores history in a per-user SQLite database with restrictive file permissions.
How is Clipman different from CopyQ, Klipper, or GPaste?
Three things. First, it's Wayland-native: a GNOME Shell extension watches the clipboard over D-Bus, so there's no polling loop and no subprocesses constantly probing the clipboard. Second, it's quiet — no Electron, no background services beyond a small Python daemon. Third, privacy is built in by default: incognito mode pauses recording entirely, and detected secrets (labelled passwords, tokens, keys, card numbers) are removed from the history on a 30-second timer.
Does Clipman work outside GNOME?
Not yet. Clipman is built for GNOME on Wayland: its GNOME Shell extension is how it sees what you copy. Support for KDE Plasma and wlroots compositors such as Sway and Hyprland is planned in #318.
Is my clipboard data ever uploaded anywhere?
No. Clipboard data never leaves your machine. History lives in a SQLite database at ~/.local/share/clipman/clipman.db with restrictive file permissions (0600). There is no telemetry, no sync, and no cloud. The only network activity is an optional once-daily version check against the GitHub Releases API — it sends no identifiers or clipboard data, can be switched off in Preferences → Updates, and is off by default on Snap and Flatpak (those channels update themselves). Backups are explicit, off by default, and write to a local file you choose.
How does sensitive-data detection actually work?
When something lands on the clipboard, Clipman checks it against known secret shapes, locally: vendor API tokens (GitHub, AWS, Stripe, Slack, OpenAI and others), private keys, JSON Web Tokens, URLs with a password inside, labelled values such as PASSWORD=…, Authorization headers, Luhn-valid card numbers, TOTP seeds, and command lines that take a password. Matches are stored masked in the list and removed from the history on a configurable 10–300-second timer (default 30 s). A bare password with no label is not detected, and the system clipboard itself is not cleared; both are planned (#313, #314). Detection runs in-process; no rules are downloaded.
Can I use Clipman without the GNOME extension?
No. On GNOME the extension is how Clipman sees what you copy: GNOME offers no other way (wl-paste --watch needs the data-control protocol, which GNOME does not have). install.sh sets it up; otherwise install it from extensions.gnome.org.
What about Wayland's clipboard security restrictions?
Wayland deliberately scopes clipboard access to focused windows, which breaks naive X11-era managers when they're not focused. Clipman doesn't try to fight that — the GNOME Shell extension reads the clipboard from inside the compositor, where it's allowed. Pasting is implemented by simulating a paste keystroke (Ctrl+V, or Ctrl+Shift+V in terminals) in the focused window, not by writing directly to it.