Clipboard

Access to the clipboard can be done via a special non-instantiable class called Clipboard. This class provides the basic functionality to work with the clipboard, as follows:

Access to the clipboard depends on the type of backend you are using (e.g. the WindowsConsole backend relies on low-level APIs such as OpenClipboard, GetClipboardData, EmptyClipboard, SetClipboardData, and CloseClipboard). As such, you will only be able to use this class after the application has been initialized (for example from a window factory passed to .window(...), or from an event handler once .run() has started). Calling static methods from this class before that moment will have no effect.

Example

A typical example of how to use the clipboard looks like the following:

use appcui::prelude::*;

fn main() -> Result<(), appcui::system::Error> {
    App::new()
        .window(|| {
            // the application is initialized when this factory runs
            if let Some(text) = Clipboard::text() {
                // do something with the text from the clipboard
            }
            Clipboard::set_text("Hello world");
            window!("Clipboard,a:c,w:40,h:9")
        })
        .run()
}

Remarks: Keep in mind that calling Clipboard::text() will always create a String object containing the content of the clipboard. If you just want to check whether something exists in the clipboard (for example, to enable or disable some menu items), use the Clipboard::has_text() method instead.

Limitations

Depending on the type of terminal, the clipboard comes with some limitations (for example, with the WindowsConsole backend, the clipboard cannot store Unicode characters that are not in WTF-16 format—within the range 0..0xFFFF).