clipboard-rs

clipboard-rs is a cross-platform Rust library for getting and setting system clipboard content. It handles plain text, HTML, rich text, PNG images, and files, and can also monitor the clipboard for changes through a watcher API.

It supports Windows, macOS, and Linux (X11, with optional Wayland), plus beta iOS support, exposing a uniform Clipboard trait and a format-aware API so you can query available formats and read or write arbitrary type identifiers. It is commonly used in Tauri and Electron-adjacent Rust desktop tooling.

What You Get

• Read and write plain text, HTML, and rich text
• Read and write PNG images and file lists via clipboard
• A clipboard-change watcher for monitoring updates
• Format enumeration via available_formats and custom type identifiers
• Cross-platform backends for Windows, macOS, X11, and Wayland

Common Use Cases

• Building copy/paste features into Rust desktop apps
• Watching the clipboard to power a clipboard-history manager
• Transferring images or files through the system clipboard
• Reading rich text or HTML content set by other applications

Under The Hood

Architecture - The crate defines a common Clipboard trait and shared types in lib.rs and common.rs, then dispatches to per-OS implementations under src/platform (win.rs, macos.rs, x11.rs, wayland.rs, ios.rs) selected by target. The watcher API wraps each platform’s native change notification so applications receive callbacks when clipboard contents change, while the format-identifier system lets callers read or write arbitrary MIME-like types.

Tech Stack - Rust (2021 edition, MSRV 1.67) with image as an optional default dependency for PNG/JPEG handling, wl-clipboard-rs behind a wayland feature, and objc2 bindings for Apple platforms. Feature flags gate image support and Wayland so downstream builds only pull what they need.

Code Quality - The repository ships an integration test suite under tests/ covering strings, files, images, and the change watcher, plus GitHub Actions CI, a CHANGELOG, and runnable examples. Platform-specific code is cleanly isolated per module, and maintenance is consistent across recent releases.

API Design - The API is uniform and ergonomic: a Clipboard/ClipboardContext exposes typed getters and setters (get_text, set_image, etc.) plus available_formats for discovery, and a watcher context handles change subscriptions. Bilingual documentation and examples ease onboarding, with the main nuance being platform capability differences captured in the README’s support matrix.