# The &klipper; Handbook

## 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 &Carsten.Pfeiffer.mail;.

## Using &klipper;

### Basic Usage

The &klipper; icon. The &klipper; icon

To display the clipboard history, click on the &klipper; icon in the &kde; panel, 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.

To remove &klipper; from your panel, open the pop-up menu and select Quit. A dialogue will ask you whether &klipper; should start automatically when you log in.

### 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 (⪚ 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 Configure Klipper... dialogue, with 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;X.

Clipboard contents which match a regular expression can also be edited before performing an action on them. Select Edit contents... on the &klipper; pop-up menu, and you can change the clipboard contents in the dialogue 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/Selection Behaviour

#### General

&klipper; can be used to set the behaviour of the clipboard and selection in &kde;.

The &X-Window; uses two separate clipboard buffers: the selection and the clipboard. Text is placed in the selection buffer by simply selecting it, and can be pasted with the middle mouse button. To place text in the clipboard buffer, select it and press &Ctrl;X or &Ctrl;C . Text from the clipboard buffer is pasted using &Ctrl;V or by selecting Edit Paste .

#### Changing Clipboard/Selection Behaviour

In order to change clipboard/selection behaviour, select Configure Klipper... from the &klipper; pop-up menu, and in the dialogue box that appears, select the General tab. Selecting Separate clipboard and selection makes the clipboard and selection function as completely separate buffers as described above. With this option set, the option Ignore selection will prevent &klipper; from including the contents of the selection in its clipboard history and from performing actions on the contents of the selection. Selecting Synchronise contents of the clipboard and the selection causes the clipboard and selection buffers to always be the same, meaning that text in the selection can be pasted with either the middle mouse button or the key combination &Ctrl;V , and similarly for text in the clipboard buffer.

## Configuring Klipper

### Viewing the Configuration Dialogue

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

### General Options

Popup menu at mouse-cursor position

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

Save clipboard contents on exit

- If this option is on, the clipboard history will be saved when &klipper; exits, allowing you to use it next time &klipper; starts.

Remove whitespace when executing actions

- If selected, any whitespace (spaces, tabs, &etc;) at the beginning and end of the clipboard contents will be removed before passing the clipboard contents to an application. This is useful, for example, if the clipboard contains a &URL; with spaces which, if opened by a web browser, would cause an error.

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.

Prevent empty clipboard

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

Ignore selection

- Sets the clipboard mode. See clipboard-modes.

Synchronise contents of the clipboard and the selection

- Sets the clipboard mode. See clipboard-modes.

Separate clipboard and selection

- Sets the clipboard mode. See clipboard-modes.

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, double-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 (⪚ 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, ⪚ 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 dialogue.

  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.

### Shortcuts 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:

None

- The selected action cannot be accessed directly from the keyboard

Default

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

Custom

- 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 Licence

&klipper;

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

Program copyright 1998-2000 &Carsten.Pfeiffer; &Carsten.Pfeiffer.mail;

Currently maintained by &Carsten.Pfeiffer;

Documentation copyright 2000-2003 &Philip.Rodrigues; &Philip.Rodrigues.mail;

&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. If it does not appear, you can start it by selecting Panel Menu Add Applet Klipper in any context menu in &kicker;, the &kde; Panel.

&klipper; icon Screenshot
&documentation.index;