yank

Yank terminal output to clipboard.

Description

Read input from stdin and display a selection interface that allows a field to be selected and copied to the clipboard. Fields are determined by splitting the input on a delimiter sequence, optionally specified using the -d option. New line, carriage return and tab characters are always treated as delimiters.

Using the Ctrl-N and Ctrl-P keys will move the field selection forward and backward. The interface supports several Emacs like key bindings, consult the man page for further reference. Pressing the return key will invoke the yank command and write the selected field to its stdin. The yank command defaults to xsel[1] but could be anything that accepts input on stdin. When invoking yank everything supplied after the -- option will be used as the yank command, see examples below. The default yank command can also be defined at compile time, see compilation below.

Motivation

Others including myself consider it a cache miss when resort to using the mouse. Copying output from the terminal is still one of the few cases where I still use the mouse. Several terminal multiplexers solves this issue, however I don't want to be required to use a multiplexer but instead use a terminal agnostic solution.

Examples

• Yank a environment variable key or value:

  env | yank -d =
  

• Yank a field from a CSV file:

  yank -d \", <file.csv
  

• Yank a whole line using the -l option:

  make 2>&1 | yank -l
  

• If stdout is not a terminal the selected field will be written to stdout and exit without invoking the yank command:

  yank | cat
  

• Yank the selected field to the clipboard as opposed of the default primary clipboard:

  yank -- xsel -b
  

Compilation

Run the following command:

make

The default yank command can be defined using the YANKCMD environment variable. Example: OS X users would use pbcopy as the default yank command:

YANKCMD=pbcopy make

Alternatively put the YANKCMD variable declaration in your local config.mk file.

Installation

Debian

On testing and unstable:

sudo apt-get install yank

The binary is installed at /usr/bin/yank-cli due to a naming conflict.

OS X

brew install yank

From source

The install directory defaults to /usr/local:

make install

Change the install directory using the PREFIX environment variable:

PREFIX=DIR make install

[1] http://www.vergenet.net/~conrad/software/xsel/