Keepboard – Clipboard Manager

Keepboard is a free open source clipboard manager. It can save clipboard history (either automatically or on-demand) and provides the ability to quickly search and paste clipboard items copied in the past. It supports text, image and file clipboard items. Keepboard has been tested on Linux (GNOME, KDE...), Mac OS and Windows platforms.

Motivation

Before making Keepboard, I tried using several other clipboard managers, but none of them had everything what I needed.

Since on my daily work I often use both Mac and Linux (and Windows in the past), I had to use different clipboard managers for different platforms, which is a bit inconvenient (different set of features, different UI, hotkeys, etc). Thus I decided to build Keepboard with Java, so that it does not depend on a specific operating system.

Additionally, I was also not very happy with performance and responsiveness of many of other clipboard managers - it is somewhat annoying when a clipboard manager freezes and you wait for it to recover or have to restart it when you want to e.g. quickly paste a saved database script or similar to debug some issue which is halting the production at that moment. :) Thus I invested a lot of effort to make sure that stability and responsiveness are implemented correctly – so far users did not report any issues regarding the performance.

Community

Initially I used Keepboard only for myself, but I decided to publish it as a free open source solution to be available for others who might find it useful too. I am very glad that it gained traction very quickly and that lots of users are happy using it – since the launch in 2011, I added many improvements and enhancements based on feature requests and ideas from the users. Also the editors of Softpedia, cnet and several other software downloads sites have reviewed it and included it in the recommended software tools list.

Main Features

Of course, the main feature of every clipboard manager is to keep history of items that were copied into the clipboard:

Keepboard window can be opened via the Ctrl + ` (back tick) hotkey, which is configurable. Picking the selected item (Enter or double-click) closes Keepboard window and the item is automatically pasted into the currently focused editor of any other application.

Frequently used items can be given custom names and separated into groups so that they can be found and filtered quickly:

Items can be searched by containing text:

Preview area location can be customized (below is my favorite view, i.e. on the right to the history list):

Hotkeys for all variety of actions can be customized:

Installation

Installation from Snap Store on Linux

The easiest way to install Keepboard on Linux is to grab it from Snap Store (or search for it in the software center and alike in your distro that includes Snap Store as a source), or simply install it via command line:

sudo snap install keepboard

Snap takes care of the rest and Keepboard does not require any additional permissions or configuration (it saves all data only locally and does not need network access nor disk access apart from its snap-confined directory), so just launch it after installation. After that it can be activated when needed by clicking on its icon in the system tray or more handily by pressing the Ctrl + ` (back tick) global hotkey.

Standalone Installation (all platforms)

There is no need to run any custom installation of Keepboard, just download and extract the archive and run it. Keepboard can be displayed by clicking on its icon in the system tray or more conveniently by pressing the Ctrl + ` (back tick) hotkey.

Java Runtime Environment, version 1.8 or newer, is needed to run Keepboard. Also, depending on your OS settings, you may have to grant Keepboard the permissions to run and to write the data to its folder, as well as the necessary permissions to auto-paste content to other applications if you would like to utilize this feature too (enabled by default).

Linux: Run the start.sh script to launch Keepboard (you may have to grant the 'execute' permission to this file).

Windows: Run the Start.VBS script to launch Keepboard.

Mac: Run the Keepboard.app to launch Keepboard. Depending on how you downlaoded and unpacked Keepboard archive, newer versions of Mac OS might translocate the application path internally. If that happens (an error stating that start.sh script cannot be found), to make the application run from the folder where you moved it (so it finds the jar, scripts and writes data to the Keepboard folder only), navigate via command line to the Keepboard directory and execute: 

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine Keepboard.app

Keepboard saves all data in its working folder (history and prefs folders), which can also be copied together with Keepboard to another machine for example, to keep all the history.

Notes

• Keepboard does not support automatic clipboard history synchronization through network between different machines (some other clipboard managers do, so you may want to look at the alternatives if this is a desirable feature for you) and does not perform any network communication at all – everything is saved only on the host machine where Keepboard is running, which is good from the security and privacy perspective.
• Tray icon might not be displayed correctly on some desktop environments/themes and can be simply removed by unticking "Show icon in system tray" in the View menu.

Contribution

Please feel free to write feature requests, bug reports and any ideas about Keepboard improvements. If you are a software developer (Java), please feel free to submit pull requests for review into the Keepboard repository, the entire Keepboard code is open source. Thank you!