Ratpoison, Clipboard Stack

This is the second post about the Ratpoison window manager.

How many times have you found your self keeping snippets of text in a text editor just so you can use them later because your clipboard will be overwritten with a new selection?

Here is a neat solution using Ratpoison: a clipboard stack.

Using xclip, a simple shell script and the appropriate Ratpoison key bindings we can accomplish the following:

Note that C-t is Ratpoison’s default escape sequence.

With C-t = the clipboard stack is displayed using ratmen, so we can select the snippet we want and bring it to the clipboard.

With C-t # a ratmen menu is displayed so we can perform operations on the stack such as:

• Push: Push the current selection into the stack
• Pop: Take the latest snippet in the stack as the current selection (so we can paste it with Ctrl+v as usual)
• Delete: Display the list of snippets in the stack so we can select one to delete
• Purge: Completely purge the content of the clipboard stack

We get this functionality using the Ratpoison bindings:

bind numbersign  exec clipboard_stack.sh menu
bind equal  exec clipboard_stack.sh select

This snippet appears in my .ratpoisonrc file.

Notice how I’ve used key bindings that correspond to the default ones that tmux use for a similar purpose, this gets us some consistency all across.

Now we can push into the stack any selections we know we could use latter and just grab them from the list when needed.