# The &klipper; Handbook

Philip
Rodrigues

    phil.rod@ntlworld.com

Carsten
Pfeiffer

    pfeiffer@kde.org

Developer
Lauri
Watts

    lauri@kde.org

Reviewer
2000
2001
2002
Philip Rodrigues
&FDLNotice;
2002-01-11
2.92.00

&klipper; is the &kde; clipboard cut & paste utility.

KDE
Klipper
kdebase
clipboard

## Introduction

&klipper; is the &kde; clipboard utility. It stores clipboard history, and allows you to link clipboard contents to application actions. Please report any problems or feature requests to Carsten Pfeiffer pfeiffer@kde.org.

## Using &klipper;

### Basic Usage

To display the clipboard history, click on the &klipper; icon, or press &Ctrl;&Alt;V . Previous clipboard entries are shown at the top of the pop-up menu which appears. Selecting one of these copies it to the clipboard, from where it can be pasted into any &kde; or X application as usual.

### Actions

&klipper; can perform actions on the contents of the clipboard, based on whether they match a particular regular expression. For example, any clipboard contents starting with http:// can be passed to &Netscape; or &konqueror; as &URL;s to open.

To use this feature, just copy a &URL; or filename to the clipboard. If there is a matching regular expression in &klipper;'s list, a menu will appear showing you the options you have (&eg; Open &URL; in &konqueror;, open &URL; in &Netscape;). Use the mouse or keyboard to select the option you want, and &klipper; will run the program you have selected, opening the address pointed to by the clipboard contents.

If you do not want to perform any actions on the clipboard contents, select Do Nothing on the pop-up menu to return to what you were doing before. If you leave the menu, it will disappear, leaving you to continue your work. You can change the time that the menu remains for in the Preferences dialog, and the option Timeout for action pop-ups under the General tab.

Actions can be disabled completely by clicking on &klipper; and selecting Actions Enabled, or by pressing &Ctrl;&Alt;V followed by &Ctrl;&Alt;X.

Clipboard contents which match a regular expression can also be edited before performing an action on them. Select Edit and process again on the &klipper; pop-up menu, and you can change the clipboard contents in the dialog which appears, before clicking the OK button to run the appropriate action.

Pressing &Ctrl;&Alt;R shows the pop-up menu to repeat the last action which &klipper; performed.

### Clipboard Modes

#### General

&klipper; can be used to set the clipboard mode for the whole of &kde;. The first mode will be familiar to &Microsoft; &Windows; and &Mac; users: Text is inserted into the clipboard using an application's cut/copy (or generally &Ctrl;X and &Ctrl;C respectively) function, and the application's paste (or generally &Ctrl;V) function pastes the contents of this clipboard.

The second mode will be more familiar to longtime &UNIX; users: Selected text is copied to this clipboard, and clicking the middle mouse button pastes the contents of this clipboard.

#### Changing Clipboard Modes

In order to change clipboard modes, select Preferences from the &klipper; pop-up menu, and in the dialog box that appears, select the General tab. The Synchronize contents of the clipboard and the selection check box determines the clipboard mode. If the box is selected, the clipboard functions in the &UNIX; mode; if not, the &Windows;/&Mac; mode is used.

## &klipper; Preferences

### Viewing the Preferences Dialog

To view or change &klipper;'s settings, open the &klipper; pop-up menu, and select Preferences. The &klipper; Preferences Dialog will appear. Its contents are described below.

### General Options

Pop-up menu at mouse-cursor position

  Make the &klipper; pop-up menus appear at the position of the mouse cursor, instead of their default positions of in the &kde; Panel. Useful if you use the mouse more than the keyboard.

Save clipboard contents on exit

  If this option is on, selecting an item from the history causes &klipper; to check if any actions are applicable for that item, and shows the possible actions. If the option is off, actions cannot be run on items from the history.

Replay actions on an item selected from history

  If this is switched on, selecting an item from the history causes &klipper; to display the actions pop-up on that item, if appropriate.

Synchronize contents of the clipboard and the selection

  Sets the clipboard mode. See .

Prevent empty clipboard

  If selected, the clipboard will never be empty: &klipper; will insert the most recent item from the clipboard into the clipboard history instead of allowing it to be empty.

Timeout for Action pop-ups

  Set the time that a pop-up menu will remain for if you do nothing with it.

Clipboard history size

  Sets the number of items that are stored in the clipboard history.

### Actions Options

Editing Expressions/Actions

  On the Actions tab, click the regular expression or action that you want to edit. An in-place text editing box will appear in which the text can be edited as you wish. Make sure you press Enter when you are done.

Adding Expressions/Actions

  Click the Add Action button to add a regular expression for &klipper; to match. &klipper; uses &Qt;'s `QRegExp`, which understands most regular expressions as you would use in grep or egrep for instance.

  You can add a description of the regular expression type (&eg; HTTP URL) by left clicking in the Description column.

  You can find detailed information about the use of `QRegExp` regular expressions at http://doc.trolltech.com/qregexp.html#details. Note that &klipper; does not support the wildcard mode mentioned on this page.

  Edit the regular expression as described above. To add a command to execute, right click, select Add Command and edit the command which appears in the tree under the regular expression.

  Note that %s in the command line is replaced with the clipboard contents, &eg; if your command definition is ``kedit` %s` and your clipboard contents are `/home/phil/textfile`, the command ``kedit` `/home/phil/textfile`` will be run. To include %s in the command line, escape it with a backslash, as so: `\%s`.

Advanced...

  Brings up the Disable Actions for windows of type WM_CLASS dialog.

  Some programs, such as &konqueror;, use the clipboard internally. If you get unwanted &klipper; pop-ups all the time when using a certain application, do the following:

  1. Open the application

  2. From a terminal, run ``xprop` | `grep` `WM_CLASS`` and then click on the window of the application you are running

  3. The first string after the equals sign is the one to enter

  Once the WM_CLASS is added, no more actions will be generated for windows of that application.

### Shortcut Options

The shortcuts tab allows you to change the keyboard shortcuts which are used to access &klipper; functions. You can change the shortcut to one of three things:

No Key

  The selected action cannot be accessed directly from the keyboard

Default Key

  The selected action uses &klipper;'s default key. These are the shortcuts referred to in this manual.

Custom Key

  The selected action is assigned to the keys you choose.

  To choose a custom key for the action you have selected, click on the representation of a key in the lower right of the screen to activate it, and type the desired key combination on your keyboard, as in any &kde; application.

## Credits and License

&klipper;

Program copyright 1998 Andrew Stanley-Jones asj@cban.com

Program copyright 1998-2000 Carsten Pfeiffer pfeiffer@kde.org

Currently maintained by Carsten Pfeiffer

Documentation copyright 2000-2002 Philip Rodrigues phil.rod@ntlworld.com

&underFDL; &underGPL;

## Installation

### How to obtain &klipper;

&install.intro.documentation;

### Compilation and Installation

&klipper; should compile and install along with the kdebase package, and appear on your &kde; panel (&kicker;) when you run KDE 3.

&klipper; icon
Screenshot

To disable this, simply remove the file `$KDEDIR/share/autostart/klipper.desktop` or create a file `$HOME/share/autostart/klipper.desktop` with the following contents:

    [Desktop Entry]
    Hidden=true

The latter will keep the system installation intact and only prevent &klipper; being started for you, without affecting other users.

&documentation.index;