Ever tried copying code from SSH conn and ended up doing a “finger workout” in your keyboard? Me too

Recently I’ve given a crack into this “run agent in another machine thing”. At least for me, RAM is very expensive right now and my Thinkpad is strugling to keep up with it’s mere 16 GB.

But hey, I do have an older laptop with another 16 GB. It’s DDR4, but still works. Arch installed, ssh configured… And having to “Ctrl + Alt + Shift + select” to copy every time.

Not ideal, but worry not. Let’s see how a shared clipboard over SSH in Wayland.

NOTE: I personally use wayland and sway. But this should work across all waylandroots based environments.

Packages needed

This is a cortersy of this incredible package called Waypipe.

It was packages for ubuntu, arch and I believe most maintream distributions. If not, you can compile yourself, just follow the README of the project and you’re good to go.

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# Arch, btw
sudo pacman -S waypipe

# Debian-based
sudo apt install waypipe

NOTE: It’s imperative for you to install in both the HOST (ssh server) and the client (your machine).

Setting everything up

Now you only need to connect to your server, using their wrapper.

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waypipe ssh yourUser@your-server

If it’s a headless server (no GUI), you might get a vulkan error. This happens because it tries to access the GPU from your server, and if you don’t have the drivers, no bueno.

To prevent that, you can use the flag no-gpu and you’re good to go.

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waypipe --no-gpu ssh yourUser@your-server

It’s too hard to type it EVERY time

Yeah, fully agree. Let’s fix that. In my case, I’ve just setup an alias in my ~/.bashrc.

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alias sshc="waypipe --no-gpu ssh --"

DONE! Whenever want to connect with the [c]lipboard enabled, I just type sshc user@host and it will work flawlessly.

Tmux idiosyncrasies

Tmux has it’s own display and socket thing going on and it often conflict with waypipe. But the fix is easy enough: just add some config to your .tmux.conf.

set -g update-environment "DISPLAY WAYLAND_DISPLAY XDG_RUNTIME_DIR SSH_AUTH_SOCK"

set-hook -g client-attached 'run-shell "tmux setenv -g WAYLAND_DISPLAY #{WAYLAND_DISPLAY}"'

Reload with source ~/.tmux.conf (or close all your tmuxes) and you can now access the clipboard, even from the remote machine. Even from opencode auto select/copy.