Clipboard

laufey can read and write the operating system’s clipboard as plain text, mirroring the web navigator.clipboard.readText() / writeText() surface. The two operations are application-scoped free functions:

#![allow(unused)]
fn main() {
// Write text to the system clipboard.
laufey::write_clipboard_text("hello from laufey");

// Read it back. Returns `None` if the clipboard is empty, holds no text, or
// the backend doesn't support clipboard access.
if let Some(text) = laufey::read_clipboard_text() {
  println!("clipboard: {text}");
}
}

Passing an empty string to write_clipboard_text clears the clipboard. Both functions must be called on the UI thread.

The implementation differs by platform. macOS uses NSPasteboard (UIPasteboard on iOS), Windows uses the Win32 clipboard with the CF_UNICODETEXT format, and Linux uses the GTK clipboard (the CLIPBOARD selection) on the CEF and WebView backends.

The engine-free Winit backend has no web engine bundled, so it shells out to the platform’s standard clipboard tools instead — pbcopy / pbpaste on macOS, clip / Get-Clipboard on Windows, and wl-clipboard (falling back to xclip) on Linux. These are present on a default desktop install of each platform; if the Linux tools are missing, reads return None and writes are a no-op.