Clipboard Copy

Copy several useful fragments from this session into clipboard history at once, each as its own entry, each containing only the part worth pasting.

The user has a clipboard history manager, so copying 3-6 items is cheap and useful. The value of this skill is extraction quality, not volume: a command without its $ prompt, a path without the prose around it, a query without the explanation. Never copy a whole assistant message — that is what the built-in /copy is for.

Arguments

• [hint] — free text narrowing what to grab: /p-clipboard-copy the sql and the pod name. With no hint, auto-detect from the recent turns.
• --all — widen the scan from the last few turns to the whole session.
• --yes — skip the confirmation step and copy immediately.
• --delay SEC — seconds between copies. Default 0.7.

Scan window

Default: the last ~3 assistant turns plus any user turn that named something concrete. With --all, the whole session. If a hint names something older than the window, search the whole session for it regardless.

Workflow

1. Collect candidates

Walk the scan window and pull out every fragment that matches the taxonomy below. A candidate is one clipboard entry — never bundle two unrelated things into one entry, and never split something that is only useful whole (a multi-line command with && is one entry).

Drop anything that is:

• Already trivially retypable (ls, cd .., a single digit).
• Prose or explanation rather than an artifact.
• A near-duplicate of another candidate — keep the most complete version.
• Secret material: tokens, passwords, private keys, .env values. Skip these silently unless the user's hint asked for them by name.

2. Rank, then propose

Rank by how likely the user is to paste it next. Signals, strongest first:

1. The hint named it.
2. It is the thing the last turn was actually about — the command just written, the URL just created.
3. It is an action the user must now take elsewhere (run this, open this, paste this into a PR).
4. It is an identifier they will need to reference again.

Prefer ranking a formatted draft #1 when it is a close call. Any entry can carry formatting, but only the top-ranked one pastes rich on a plain Cmd+V — the rest need an extra action when recalled from history (see below).

Print a numbered table, ranked most relevant first:

Truncate previews to ~60 chars. Then stop and ask:

Copy all 3? (ok / just 1,3 / drop 2 / also <thing>)

Wait for the answer. Skip this step only with --yes.

3. Copy

Write each selected fragment to its own file in the scratchpad directory, named NN-<type>.txt, then hand them to the script in reverse relevance order — least relevant first, most relevant last — so the top-ranked item is the active clipboard and the rest stack behind it in history:

scripts/clip.sh /scratch/03-path.txt /scratch/02-url.txt /scratch/01-command.txt

For a formatted draft, also write a sibling NN-draft.html next to its .txt. The script picks it up automatically — no flag, and it works for any number of entries:

# 01-draft.html sits beside 01-draft.txt and is detected
scripts/clip.sh /scratch/03-path.txt /scratch/02-url.txt /scratch/01-draft.txt

Always pass files, never inline strings — inline text gets mangled by shell quoting on anything containing quotes, backticks, $, or newlines.

Then report where each item landed in the history:

Clipboard history (Cmd+V pastes #1):
  1. draft  rich — bold and bullets paste formatted
  2. url    https://github.com/org/repo/pull/42
  3. path   src/handler/auth.go:118

When an entry below #1 is rich, add one line: recall it in Raycast, then Cmd+K -> "Paste as... RTF" to keep the formatting.

Detection taxonomy

Extraction rules

These are the "only the necessary part" rules. Apply all of them:

• Strip fences. Remove ``` delimiters and the language tag.
• Strip prompts. Leading $ , % , > , # on shell lines.
• Strip line numbers. Output from cat -n, grep -n, or a Read tool result carries 12→ or 12: prefixes — remove them and restore original indentation.
• Strip ANSI escapes from captured terminal output.
• Strip markdown link syntax — [text](url) becomes the URL when the candidate is a url, the text when it is a draft.
• No trailing newline on single-line values (paths, URLs, IDs) so pasting into a form field or another shell does not submit early.
• Keep the trailing newline on multi-line blocks (code, diffs, drafts).
• Never truncate the payload. Previews are truncated; clipboard entries are not.

Rich text for drafts

Slack's composer converts Markdown as you type, never on paste. Pasted *bold* and **bold** both show literal asterisks, and - item stays a dash. The only thing that pastes as real formatting is a rich flavor on the pasteboard.

To make an entry rich, write a sibling .html file next to its .txt. The script detects it and puts three flavors on the pasteboard: plain text, HTML and RTF (converted from the HTML with textutil).

Any number of entries can be rich, but they do not behave identically:

Plain Enter on a history entry pastes the plain-text flavor, and "Paste as... HTML" does not render — RTF is the flavor that survives the round trip. This was verified on this machine, not assumed.

Write the HTML as a fragment with no <html>/<body> wrapper. Escape &, < and > in the content itself. All of these are verified to render in Slack:

Emit a heading as exactly <b>text</b><br>. The script keys off that shape and inserts a break before each such heading in both flavors, so Cmd+V and "Paste as... RTF" render identically. Without it a heading sits flush against the list or paragraph above it. Inline bold mid-sentence is never followed by <br>, so it is left alone, and a heading at the very start gets no leading blank line.

The RTF conversion passes -inputencoding UTF-8. Without it textutil falls back to the system codepage and mangles every non-ASCII character — em dashes, • bullets, accented letters, kana all arrive as mojibake.

The plain-text file is still required: it is the fallback anywhere rich text is not accepted, and what plain Enter pastes from history. Make it readable rather than marked up — drop emphasis markers, use • for bullets, indent nested bullets four spaces, and render links as text (url).

Notes

• Why 0.7s. Raycast polls the pasteboard roughly every 0.5s. Measured on this machine: copies spaced 1.2s and 0.7s apart are all captured; copies spaced 0.3s apart are overwritten before the poll and lost, leaving only the last one. 0.7 is the calibrated floor with margin. Raising item count costs (N-1) x 0.7s.
• No trailing sleep is needed — the final item stays on the pasteboard and gets picked up by the next poll whatever happens.
• The user's current clipboard is overwritten, but it is already in their history, so nothing is lost.
• Other clipboard managers: Maccy and Paste also poll. If entries go missing, raise --delay.