Clipboard (CB): a command line clipboard manager with named clipboards and history

What Clipboard solves that xclip and pbcopy do not

A system clipboard holds one thing. Copy a second item and the first is gone. That is fine for a single paste and painful the moment you alternate between a command, a token and a path. Clipboard, which installs a command called cb, addresses that by giving you an unlimited number of named clipboards, each with unlimited capacity and its own history, according to the README. The README also lists text, files, directories and binary data as copyable content, and points to a wiki page for GUI clipboard compatibility. The intended user is someone who lives in a shell and writes scripts. One quoted user in the README says they wanted "an easy cb copy && cb paste" instead of remembering input and output flags for xclip across file types. That is the honest framing: Clipboard is a scripting primitive, not a desktop history window.

How the cb command, clipboards and history fit together

The model is a set of clipboards addressed by name, with a default one used when you do not name anything. Copying writes into the current clipboard and appends to that clipboard's history; pasting reads from it. Because each clipboard keeps its own history, switching names is how you separate concerns: one clipboard for credentials, another for paths, another for snippets, without them evicting each other. The README describes the whole thing as a scriptable API for automating workflows, and the repository is a C++ project built with CMake, with src/ holding the sources and a justfile wrapping the build. The README does not spell out the history retention policy, so how far back a clipboard remembers is not something you can confirm from the documentation. The GUI compatibility page is where the project says integration with existing system clipboards is described, which matters if you expect cb to be visible to other applications.

Installing Clipboard with the install script or a package

The README offers a one line install for everything except Windows. It downloads and runs install.sh, so read the script first if you care about what lands on your machine.

curl -sSL https://github.com/Slackadays/Clipboard/raw/main/install.sh | sh

On Windows the README gives a PowerShell equivalent and says to run it as Administrator.

(Invoke-WebRequest -UseBasicParsing https://github.com/Slackadays/Clipboard/raw/main/install.ps1).Content | powershell

If you prefer a package manager, the README lists several. Alpine needs the Community repository enabled first, and the AUR offers clipboard, clipboard-bin and clipboard-git.

apk add clipboard

yay -S clipboard

Conda-forge ships it as cb-clipboard, and Flatpak installs it from Flathub. The README also mentions nightly Flatpak builds under GitHub Downloads. After installation the command you call is cb; a first real use is copying a file and pasting it elsewhere, which is the case the README highlights as different from flag juggling in xclip.

Building from source with the justfile

If no package fits your platform, the repository ships a justfile that configures and compiles with CMake in Release mode, installs with sudo, and can clean the build directory. The target count is fixed at 12 jobs, which is a detail worth noticing: on a smaller machine you may want to edit that line rather than inherit it.

just build

The justfile expands to cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release inside build/, then cmake --build . -j 12, then sudo cmake --install . The clean recipe removes build/ entirely. Building from source is also the path implied by the README's opening request for a C++ contributor, since that is the work the maintainer says is needed.

Where Clipboard is the wrong tool

The most concrete limitation is stated by the project itself, at the top of the README: development cannot continue unless someone who knows C++ helps, and the maintainer gives an email address for that. The last push was 2026-05-06, and the newest release is 0.10.0 from 2024-11-17, so the release line has been quiet for a long stretch. If your adoption criteria include a predictable release cadence or commercial support, this is not that project. Second, Clipboard is a terminal tool. If you want a graphical history browser, a searchable overlay or a tray icon, nothing in the README describes one, and the GUI compatibility page is about interoperating with existing clipboard systems rather than replacing them. Third, the README does not document rollback or uninstall steps, so plan how you will remove it before you pipe the install script into a shell. Finally, the README does not state the history retention policy, which makes it a poor choice if you need a guaranteed audit trail of what was copied.

Clipboard compared with xclip and pbcopy

xclip on Linux and pbcopy on macOS are the natural alternatives, and the difference is architectural rather than cosmetic. Both talk to the single system clipboard and are stateless: each invocation copies or pastes one item, and there is no notion of a second buffer or of history. Clipboard keeps its own set of named clipboards with per-clipboard history, which is state that persists between invocations. That is the whole reason the README's quoted user switched: with xclip you must remember the correct input and output flags for each file type, while cb copy and cb paste stay the same. The trade-off is that you now depend on a stateful store and on a project whose README says it needs a C++ contributor to keep going. For a one-off copy inside a shell script, xclip or pbcopy is less machinery. For a workflow with several concurrent buffers, Clipboard is the one that models the problem.

Licence and upgrade cost

Clipboard is licensed GPL-3.0, and the README's badge labels it free and open source. For anyone linking the cb binary into a larger distributed product, GPL-3.0 is a copyleft licence, so the obligations that follow from distribution are worth checking with your own legal counsel rather than assuming they are trivial. Upgrades are cheap if you installed through a package manager: apk, yay, conda and Flatpak all have their own update paths, and the README lists clipboard-bin and clipboard-git for AUR users who want to track releases or the branch. If you used install.sh, the README does not describe an upgrade or rollback procedure, so re-running the script is the only path the documentation implies. The version to compare against is 0.10.0 from 2024-11-17, with 0.9.1 before it.

Editorial conclusion

Adopt Clipboard if you script the terminal on Linux, macOS or Windows and want named clipboards with history instead of one global buffer; skip it if you need a maintained release cadence or GUI-first history browsing, since the last push was 2026-05-06 and the latest release is 0.10.0 from 2024-11-17. Before committing, run the install script or a package like apk add clipboard, then confirm that cb copy and cb paste round-trip a file and that history works on your platform.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. License: GPL-3.0
2. Project website
3. README
4. Releases
5. Slackadays/Clipboard on GitHub