Clipaste

clipaste

Fix screenshot paste in terminal AI tools — locally, over SSH, and in WSL2.

hqhq1025.github.io/clipaste · AGENTS.md · Issues

clipaste is a lightweight Rust clipboard daemon for developers who use terminal-based AI coding tools like Claude Code, Codex CLI, and Cursor. It fixes local screenshot paste on macOS and Windows, bridges their clipboards to remote servers over SSH, and connects Windows to WSL2. Graphical Linux hosts can also serve clipboard PNG images over SSH using the read-only backend described below.

Problem: You take a screenshot, switch to Claude Code / Codex / Cursor in your terminal, press Ctrl+V — nothing happens. Or you're SSH'd into a remote server and can't paste screenshots at all.

Why: macOS screenshots only put raw image data (TIFF/PNG) on the clipboard. Terminals like Ghostty and Alacritty can only Cmd+V paste text or file URLs — they can't paste raw image data. Over SSH, the remote server has no access to your local clipboard whatsoever.

Solution: clipaste is a background daemon that:

1. Local paste on macOS / Windows: Saves screenshots as PNG files and adds a path alongside the image. On macOS, this enables Cmd+V in terminals and adds the legacy PNGf type for Ctrl+V image paste. Linux reads the clipboard without adding a path or changing its formats. If you only paste into remote agents, server-only mode leaves the macOS/Windows clipboard unmodified too.

2. SSH remote paste: Runs an HTTP server on localhost:18340. Use clipaste ssh-setup to configure a remote server — it installs an xclip shim and SSH tunnel so Ctrl+V in remote Claude Code fetches the image from your local machine.

Install

Supported platforms

The clipboard-host daemon runs on macOS, Windows, and graphical Linux sessions
with a usable clipboard backend. Linux…