clipipe

clipipe is a Neovim clipboard provider that avoids starting a new process on each operation, which can be slow on Windows or WSL. Instead, it communicates over pipes with a persistent background process.

Features

• Fast
• Cross-platform:
  • Windows (native and WSL)
  • Linux (Wayland and X11)

Requirements

• Neovim: Version 0.10+
• Rust/Cargo: Required for building the clipipe binary from source (optional).
• curl: Required for downloading the pre-built binary.

Installation

Note 📝

Clipipe uses a background helper executable which it will attempt to download or build as needed. This might cause Windows Defender or other antivirus software to delay startup and display a message the first time it's run. See below for other options.

Plugin

Install this repository with your manager of choice. For example, using lazy.nvim:

require 'lazy'.setup {
  {
    'bkoropoff/clipipe',
    opts = {
      -- Optional configuration, defaults shown here:
      path = nil, -- clipipe binary
      keep_line_endings = false, -- Set to true to disable \r\n conversion on Windows
      enable = true, -- Automatically set g:clipboard to enable clipipe
      start_timeout = 5000, -- Timeout for starting background process (ms)
      timeout = 500, -- Timeout for responses from background process (ms)
      interval = 50, -- Polling interval for responses (ms)
      download = true, -- Download pre-built binary if needed
      build = true, -- Build from source if needed
    }
    end,
  },
}

Clipboard register

If you haven't already, set the clipboard option to unnamed or unnamedplus in your configuration, e.g.:

vim.o.clipboard = 'unnamedplus'

unnamed corresponds to the "primary" (middle-click paste) and unnamedplus correponds to the "clipboard" (Ctrl-V paste). This distinction is only relevant for X11 and Wayland (with compositors that support the primary selection extension); there is no difference on Windows or WSL.

See the Neovim documentation for more details.

Manual Setup

clipipe Binary

The plugin attempts to locate the clipipe binary using the following steps:

1. Path: Looks for clipipe (or clipipe.exe on Windows/WSL) in your PATH, unless overridden by the path option to setup. The binary is only used if it is runnable and the version matches the plugin.
2. Download: Downloads a binary from GitHub releases to %LOCALAPPDATA%\clipipe (Windows/WSL) or the plugin directory (if download = true)
3. Build from source (Not WSL): Tries to use cargo to build the bundled source code (if build = true)

If these all fail, you will receive an error message during setup.

If you want to manage the binary yourself, you can build it from source and either put it in your PATH or specify path as a setup option.

cargo build --release
# Output at target/release/clipipe[.exe]

clipipe is also on crates.io, but you must make sure the installed version matches the plugin.

Clipboard Provider

If enable = false in the options passed to setup, you can manually enable the clipboard provider by calling enable, or use the copy and paste functions directly, e.g.:

local clipipe = require 'clipipe'

vim.g.clipboard = {
  name = "clipipe",
  copy = {
    ["+"] = function(lines) clipipe.copy(lines, '+') end,
    ["*"] = function(lines) clipipe.copy(lines, '*') end,
  },
  paste = {
    ["+"] = function() return clipipe.paste('+') end,
    ["*"] = function() return clipipe.paste('*') end,
  }
}

License

MIT License