What's next for clipx. Roughly ordered by priority.
Right now clipboard content flies across your LAN in plaintext. Fine for a home network, sketchy for a shared office.
- AES-256-GCM encryption of all clipboard payloads
- Shared secret generated on first
clipx pair, exchanged out-of-band (displayed in terminal, user copies it) - Zero config overhead — encryption is always on once paired
Currently text only (pbcopy/pbpaste). macOS has richer clipboard APIs.
- Detect clipboard content type (text, image, file path)
- Image sync using
osascriptor native clipboard APIs via cgo - Respect size limits — images can be large, chunk transfer already handles up to 10 MB
Manual IP entry works but is friction.
-
clipx pair --scan— scan the local subnet for other clipx instances - mDNS/Bonjour discovery as an alternative to IP-based pairing
- Pairing confirmation — peer shows a prompt to accept/reject
The protocol is platform-agnostic, only the clipboard is macOS-specific.
- Abstract clipboard behind build tags (
clipboard_darwin.go,clipboard_linux.go) - Linux:
xclip/xselfor X11,wl-copy/wl-pastefor Wayland - CI testing on Linux
- All of the above shipped and stable
- Homebrew core submission (not just a tap)
- Man page (
clipx.1) - Proper semantic versioning contract — no breaking changes after v1
Things that might be worth doing but aren't committed to.
- File sync — drag a file on one Mac, paste on another. Needs a different transport (TCP for reliability).
- Clipboard history — keep the last N items,
clipx historyto browse. - Menu bar app — native macOS status bar icon showing connection status. Probably a separate repo.
- Windows support —
clip.exe/ PowerShell clipboard. Low priority unless there's demand. - Tailscale/WireGuard awareness — detect if peers are on a VPN and skip encryption (already encrypted at the tunnel level).