Gnome Clipboard History is a GNOME 45 clipboard panel now in maintenance mode

A rewrite of Clipboard Indicator with the performance as the selling point

The extension is a rewrite of Tudmotu's Clipboard Indicator, and the README is specific about why. The claim is vastly improved performance, new features, and bug fixes, with a link to a specific pull request on the original project. A technical overview is published separately at alexsaveau.dev/blog/gch. That origin explains a lot about the design. GNOME Shell extensions run inside the shell process itself, not in a separate daemon, so a clipboard manager that stores every copy has a direct cost in the compositor that draws your desktop. The project description calls it a clipboard manager that saves what you have copied into an easily accessible, searchable history panel, and everything in the tips section is built around keeping that panel cheap to open and fast to filter.

The panel opens with Super+Shift+V and does regex search with a slash

The interaction model is keyboard first. The panel opens from anywhere with Super, Shift and V, and while it is open there are shortcuts for nearly every action. Ctrl plus a digit from 1 to 9 selects the nth non-favorited entry, and Super, Ctrl plus a digit selects the nth favorited entry, which is the difference between a recent list and a curated list. Ctrl with p or n pages through the results, Ctrl, Alt and S opens settings, the slash key opens search, and F toggles the favorite state of the highlighted item. Search itself is case-insensitive regular expression, which is a sharp choice for a clipboard manager, since copied text often contains code, paths or identifiers where substring matching would be too blunt.

Favorites and private mode are the two features that decide daily use

Two settings carry most of the practical weight. The Only save favorites to disk feature wipes non-favorited items on shutdown, which is the difference between a clipboard history that grows forever and one that reflects what you actually kept. The README also documents a Private mode that temporarily stops processing copied items, so a password copied for a form does not land in a history that gets written to disk. These two features together address the reason clipboard managers get uninstalled: they accumulate everything, including the things you did not want to keep, and the fix is to make retention explicit rather than hoping the history stays out of sight.

Building from source needs the extension installed under a UUID directory

Installing from source means placing the repository inside the extensions directory under the extension UUID as the folder name, and running make.

cd ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/ && \
  git clone https://github.com/SUPERCILEX/gnome-clipboard-history.git [email protected] && \
  cd [email protected] && \
  make

The folder name is not cosmetic. GNOME identifies an extension by its UUID, and the Makefile hardcodes the install path as the extensions directory plus [email protected] with a trailing slash, so the clone directory and the identifier have to match. The make target compiles the GSettings schemas with glib-compile-schemas and compiles the translation catalogues with msgfmt, and a separate install target copies the module list into the install path. The README notes the extension is also published on the GNOME Extensions site, so the source build is for people who need to read or patch the code.

Enabling it takes one command and one shell restart

After the build, the extension is enabled through the standard gnome-extensions tool.

gnome-extensions enable [email protected]

A GNOME Shell restart is needed for it to load, and the README describes that as pressing Alt and F2 and typing r, which reloads the shell session without a full logout. The Makefile gives a fuller picture of what a release contains. The MODULES list names metadata.json, extension.js, store.js, dataStructures.js, confirmDialog.js, prefs.js, settingsFields.js, stylesheet.css, the LICENSE, the README and the schemas directory, and a bundle target zips those together with the compiled message catalogues while excluding the compiled schema. The JavaScript side is small and split by concern, with store.js, dataStructures.js and confirmDialog.js separating persistence, data handling and confirmation dialogs from the shell code in extension.js.

Branch choice is the compatibility decision, and it is documented

The versioning note is short and worth reading before you clone anything. The master branch and the 1.4.x tags support GNOME 45, while the pre-45 branch and the 1.3.x tags, or earlier, support GNOME 40 to 44. That split matters because GNOME Shell extensions are tightly coupled to the shell version they were written against, and an extension built for the wrong one will fail to load rather than degrade. There is also a locale directory, a clipboard-history.pot template and Makefile targets for updating that template with xgettext and merging it into the translation files, so the translation workflow is part of the build tooling rather than something done by hand. The JavaScript dependencies are limited to prettier as a development dependency, which keeps the runtime side of the extension free of installed packages.

Maintenance mode means the successor is Ringboard

The project status section is the most important paragraph in the README. Gnome Clipboard History is now in maintenance mode because it is being replaced by Ringboard, at the same SUPERCILEX repository under the name clipboard-history. The author is still accepting pull requests for small improvements and bug fixes, with supporting the latest GNOME version named as an example, but no new development will take place. The repository is not archived and the last push was on 2026-10-11, so the code is not dead, it is deliberately frozen. The published releases tell the same story from the other side: 1.4.7, 1.4.6 and 1.3.7 all date from March 2024, so the packaged versions available on the extensions site are considerably older than the current source.

Editorial conclusion

Adopt Gnome Clipboard History if you are on GNOME 45 and want a clipboard history panel with favorites, regex search and a private mode, since the extension installs cleanly from the extensions site and the source build is three shell commands. Do not adopt it for new development, because the author states the project is in maintenance mode with no new development taking place. Verify first whether Ringboard, the replacement project, is the better starting point, and if you stay with this one, confirm that your GNOME version matches the branch you install, since master and the 1.4.x tags target GNOME 45 while the pre-45 branch and 1.3.x tags cover GNOME 40 to 44.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. License: MIT
2. Project website
3. README
4. Releases
5. SUPERCILEX/gnome-clipboard-history on GitHub