Dion Moult Seriously who ever reads this description.

Tech Tip #9: use Klipper to automatically post to a Pastebin.

On 26 November 2011 with 7 comments

I haven’t done a tech tip in a while, but here’s a nice, simple one which I am finding very useful.

Pastebins are a really useful way to share snippets of text. However it’s sometimes a bit cumbersome to have to open a browser window, type in the URL, paste it in, click submit, then copy the URL to share with your friend. That’s why things like wgetpaste exist – small command-line utilities to automate this process and return the URL. wgetpaste isn’t the only one, of course, but they’re all rather similar.

Klipper is KDE’s Clipboard manager – whenever you copy something, via right click -> copy or ctrl-c, it gets added to your clipboard. Klipper allows you to navigate through it – so that you can paste something you copied a while back, or set up custom things to paste, or even – which is what I’ll talk about today – set it to automatically perform an action on the paste. The most common use is to automatically open a link in a browser if you copy a link from somewhere.

What we’ll tackle is to get Klipper to autopaste our clipboard item into a pastebin, and return the URL to us. So just set it up as shown below:

And you’re done! Copy something, press ctrl-alt-r to invoke the actions menu, click “Pastebin”, and now the URL of the pasted item will be in your clipboard for you to ctrl-v to your friend. Neat, eh?

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