Copy...Paste

I frequently want to copy text between my Mac and my Linux machine when I am at work. Usually, it is one short little line. It is too slow to email. Instant messaging oneself is awkward at best. Writing it to a file and secure-copying the file is still too much work given the frequency with which I do this.

A long time ago, I learnt about a utility called xclip that allows you to save/load the X11 clipboard to stdout/from stdin. So, the following two lines of shell script have saved the day:

ssh mac.fqdn.org 'DISPLAY=:0 xclip -o' | xclip -i
xclip -o | ssh mac.fqdn.org 'DISPLAY=:0 xclip -i'

I made convenient little icons to invoke these commands and tada! I had to build a universal binary for MacOS, which was fun and relatively painless.

James says on 2009-07-21T23:07:00-04:00:

Have you tried Synergy?

Standard set-up at work is Windows laptop connected to monitor A, Linux desktop to monitor B, and share a single keyboard / mouse. Synergy works wonders :)

Andre Masella says:

Interesting. That also looks good. I worry slightly about WLU's Moronic Firewall,, but I'll give it a shot. There are Ubuntu packages. :-)

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