Using xclip for Clipboard Operations in WSL and VMs Running on Windows

Note#99

notes
Published

2023-06-15

xclip -selection clipboard

This works in Windows…!

It feels a bit surprising, almost embarrassing, that I only found this solution now despite its apparent simplicity. I always thought this wasn’t possible with the Windows Terminal, whether I run WSL or a VM.

Findings

  1. In a WSL environment, the native Windows command clip.exe can be used to copy to the Windows clipboard. For example: cat file.txt | clip.exe.
  2. Interestingly, I discovered that xclip can function within WSL without the need for an external X server. This is likely due to improvements in WSLg, which provides better support for graphical applications and features such as the clipboard.
  3. It also worked for a VM running with Hyper-V, to which I connected through SSH with X11 forwardig (ssh -X).

Using xclip

The -selection option in xclip specifies which X selection to use: primary, secondary, or clipboard. The clipboard selection is used for explicit copy and paste operations, behaving similarly to the clipboard in non-X environments.

Example of copying the content of a file to the clipboard using xclip:

cat file.txt | xclip -selection clipboard

Executing the above command copies the content of file.txt to the Windows clipboard when run in WSL, allowing the text to be pasted in other Windows applications.

An Alias for Less Typing

This seems like a reasonable idea.

alias xclip='xclip -selection clipboard'