Skip to content

Clipboard Integration

Nearly every operating system has some notion of a short-term storage area which can be accessed by any program. Usually this is called the clipboard, but sometimes people refer to it as the paste buffer.

cmd2 integrates with the operating system clipboard using the pyperclip module. Command output can be sent to the clipboard by ending the command with a greater than symbol:

mycommand args >

Think of it as redirecting the output to an unnamed, ephemeral place: the clipboard. You can also append output to the current contents of the clipboard by ending the command with two greater than symbols:

mycommand arg1 arg2 >>

Limitation

The ability to redirect command output only works directly from a cmd2 command. It doesn't work after piping output to a shell command.

Developers

You can control whether the above user features of adding output to the operating system clipboard are allowed for the user by setting the cmd2.Cmd.allow_clipboard attribute. The default value is True. Set it to False and the above functionality will generate an error message instead of adding the output to the clipboard. cmd2.Cmd.allow_clipboard can be set upon initialization, and you can change it at any time from within your code.

If you would like your cmd2 based application to be able to use the clipboard in additional or alternative ways, you can use the following methods (which work uniformly on Windows, macOS, and Linux).

cmd2.clipboard

Module provides basic ability to copy from and paste to the clipboard/pastebuffer.

get_paste_buffer 

get_paste_buffer()

Get the contents of the clipboard / paste buffer.

RETURNS DESCRIPTION
str

contents of the clipboard
Source code in cmd2/clipboard.py 
 8
 9
10
11
12
13
def get_paste_buffer() -> str:
    """Get the contents of the clipboard / paste buffer.

    :return: contents of the clipboard
    """
    return typing.cast(str, pyperclip.paste())

write_to_paste_buffer 

write_to_paste_buffer(txt)

Copy text to the clipboard / paste buffer.

PARAMETER DESCRIPTION
txt

text to copy to the clipboard

TYPE: str

Source code in cmd2/clipboard.py 
16
17
18
19
20
21
def write_to_paste_buffer(txt: str) -> None:
    """Copy text to the clipboard / paste buffer.

    :param txt: text to copy to the clipboard
    """
    pyperclip.copy(txt)