Clipfan

clipfan

clipfan is one clipboard for every Mac and Linux machine you work on: copy on any of them and paste on any other, including screenshots into Claude Code and Codex CLI on a headless remote.

The brochure, [docs/BROCHURE.md](docs/BROCHURE.md), covers what you get, the trust model, and who it's for.

How it works

A daemon runs on every host. The daemon polls the local OS clipboard, exposes a signed loopback HTTP API for the app and CLI, and syncs peer clipboard updates over authenticated SSH streams. The Mac app is the control surface: it installs the local daemon, provisions peers over SSH, and keeps the fleet view current.

When a host receives a clipboard update, its daemon:

• Writes text to the local OS clipboard (a no-op on a headless host with no display server — there's nothing to write to, and that's fine).
• For images, writes the bytes to $XDG_STATE_HOME/clipfan/images/.png and puts the absolute path on the text clipboard. (This is the trick that lets Codex and Claude Code attach images via bracketed paste, no X server required. On macOS the clipboard also carries the real image bytes, so Cmd-V into Preview/Slack pastes the picture.)
• Calls tmux load-buffer on every running tmux socket so prefix-] works.
• Records the clip in a local, searchable history (see the menubar app).

Conflict policy: last-write-wins by monotonic timestamp. There is no central server. Every daemon relays a received clip onward to its configured peers (except the clip's origin), so hosts that can't see each other directly still converge through a host that sees both — typically the Mac, which holds an edge to every peer it installs.

Install

clipfan has two pieces: a **daemon** that runs on every host (macOS + Linux), and a **menubar app** on the Mac that gives you the clipboard panel and a one-click installer for adding more hosts. Start on your Mac with the menubar app — it bundles the daemon and installs everything for you.

1. Get `Cli