A Shared Clipboard to Use Between Windows and and Ubuntu

This is an advanced article. There is no "just works" packaged solution with GUI. Please write and release one.

If you are using a network that has both Linux and Ubuntu machines you might sometimes want to share text quickly between them like an address from the browser, or a snippet of text.

AutoHotKey is a free, open source scripting application that can quickly provide an extension to the normal windows copy/paste behaviour.

Save the following code as an .ahk file, or add the code to your hotkeys if you're already running AutoHotKey.

; ======== Begin AutoHotKey Script ========
; Put/get clipboard to/from a file accessible by linux and windows.
; Paste
^#v::
        FileDelete, M:\Paste\paste
        FileAppend, %clipboard%, M:\Paste\paste
return
; Copy
^#c::
        FileRead, Clipboard, M:\Paste\paste
return
; ======== End AutoHotKey Script ========

The keypress "Ctrl-WinKey-V" will paste from the windows paste buffer directly to the shared file.

"Ctrl-WinKey-C" will copy from the shared buffer file filling the windows paste/copy buffer with whatever is there, maybe something that has just been added from the Linux machine.

The address to the shared file ("paste") is a Samba share on the Linux machine, but it could just as well be on the windows machine as a share accessible by Ubuntu.

Just open the buffer file in linux as you would a normal text file, or you could automatically fill the Ubuntu clipboard using something like "incron" and "xclip". See this forum thread.

SharedCopyAndPaste (last edited 2014-01-04 12:26:02 by knome)