How do I get clipboard access (read/write) on Kotl...

# announcements

[Bernardo Ferrari]

How do I get clipboard access (read/write) on Kotlin, not Android, not AWT, not JavaFX, pure Kotlin for OS usage? I searched everywhere, the best answer so far has been to force users to install xclip, and call it from Runtime(), which is not a great solution.

[Shawn]

How do you expect this to work without a library like AWT? at some point you’re going to need to access a given platform’s specific clipboard API, and those libraries already handle detection and translation for you

[Shawn]

There’s no point in JetBrains providing it for Kotlin/Native specifically because a) it’s kinda niche b) it’s hard to maintain and test across platforms

[Shawn]

also doesn’t everyone with X11 already have xclip installed?

[Shawn]

I feel like for the majority of people using the system clipboard this is a non-issue

[egorand]

not all environments have clipboard, take embedded for example

[Shawn]

This is true, but then I think that’d mean @Bernardo Ferrari’s code wouldn’t work at all

[Shawn]

if you have X11 installed, you almost certainly have xclip unless you opted not to install the metapackage and just installed, idk like, xorg-server on its own

[Bernardo Ferrari]

I was testing against macOS, so I needed to install xclip.

[Shawn]

you can use pbcopy on macOS

[Bernardo Ferrari]

I mean, Python, Ruby, etc all have a clipboard library to take care of everything. I just looked at this, might not be hard to translate into kotlin: https://github.com/asweigart/pyperclip/blob/master/src/pyperclip/__init__.py

[Shawn]

pyperclip isn’t in the stdlib though

[Shawn]

and it literally has a hard dependency on xclip/pbcopy as documented in the leading docstring

[Shawn]

I would assume there’s no JVM analog because AWT and JavaFX exist already

[Shawn]

So, like, what do you really want here

[Bernardo Ferrari]

I am playing with scripts

[Bernardo Ferrari]

Do I have access to AWT out of nothing on everywhere?

[Shawn]

you don’t, but you also don’t have access to xclip or pbcopy everywhere either

[Shawn]

but I’m preeeetty sure you have AWT access on the major platforms if that’s sufficient

[Bernardo Ferrari]

let me test, hold on

[Bernardo Ferrari]

Well.. it is not easy or trivial to setup, but kind of works. The only weird thing is that it opens java (like a real program) and closes really fast. Thanks.

[Czar]

Be careful with awt, there is an unresolved bug: https://bugs.java.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=6606476

[Bernardo Ferrari]

I saw that @Czar , but I think it is the only way. Do you know any other?