nvim-clipy

System-wide clipboard history for Neovim. Copy anything, anywhere on your machine: Neovim, your browser, Slack, a terminal, and it's captured, searchable, and re-copyable from inside Neovim via a Telescope picker with preview.

It's backed by clipy, a small daemon that polls the OS clipboard continuously in the background, independent of Neovim. nvim-clipy talks to it over its Unix socket via vim.uv.

Why not neoclip.lua?

neoclip.lua is a similar-looking picker, but it's fundamentally different: it hooks TextYankPost, so it only records things yanked or deleted inside Neovim. Copy any text anywhere outside Neovim, and it's invisible to neoclip. Its history also lives in Neovim's own memory by default, so it resets every time Neovim closes unless you turn on persistent history.

nvim-clipy's history comes from the daemon polling the real system clipboard instead of a Neovim event, so it captures everything you copy anywhere on the machine. Because that capture is a separate process from Neovim, it persists across Neovim restarts and is shared across every Neovim instance you have open.

Prerequisites

clipy is published on crates.io and installs via cargo:

cargo install clipy

Or install prebuilt binary from GitHub Releases:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/c12i/clipy-rust/main/install.sh | sh

nvim-clipy starts the daemon for you. On VimEnter it checks whether clipy watch is already reachable and, if not, spawns it detached so it keeps running after Neovim closes. If clipy isn't on $PATH, you'll get a warning, pointing back at cargo install clipy.

If you'd rather the daemon run independently of Neovim entirely, surviving reboots, capturing clipboard changes even when Neovim is never opened, you can start it yourself under a process supervisor instead:

clipy watch > /tmp/clipy.log 2>&1 &

Installation

With lazy.nvim:

-- lua/plugins/nvim-clipy.lua
return {
  {
    "c12i/nvim-clipy",
    dependencies = { "nvim-telescope/telescope.nvim" },
    -- Must load at startup, not lazily on keypress: the daemon-autostart
    -- autocmd lives in plugin/nvim-clipy.lua, which only gets sourced once
    -- the plugin loads. Declaring only `keys` below (without `lazy = false`)
    -- would defer loading until the first keypress past VimEnter, so
    -- the autocmd never gets a chance to fire and the daemon never
    -- auto-starts.
    lazy = false,
    keys = {
      {
        "<leader>sy",
        function()
          require("nvim-clipy.telescope").pick()
        end,
        desc = "Clipboard history",
      },
    },
    config = function()
      require("nvim-clipy").setup()
    end,
  },
}

Commands

Command	Description
:ClipyList	List recent clipboard history entries
:ClipyClear	Delete all history
:ClipyStatus	Show daemon status
:ClipyStart	Start the daemon if it isn't already running
:ClipyKill	Stop the daemon (restarts automatically next time Neovim starts)
:ClipyPick	Pick an entry via Telescope, with preview
:ClipyBrowse	Browse history in a persistent bottom split

See :help nvim-clipy for details, or the Lua API via require("nvim-clipy").

:ClipyPick: <CR> copies the selected entry back to the clipboard, <C-d> deletes it.

:ClipyBrowse is an alternative to the Telescope picker: a persistent bottom split you can leave open and glance at, rather than a modal that closes on selection. Re-running :ClipyBrowse while it's already open just focuses and refreshes it instead of opening a duplicate.

Key	Action
<CR>	Copy the entry under the cursor (doesn't close the split)
dd	Delete the entry under the cursor
R	Refresh the list
q / <Esc>	Close the split

Keymaps

No default keymaps are set. If you're not using lazy.nvim's keys spec (shown in Installation above), a plain keymap works too:

vim.keymap.set("n", "<leader>sy", function()
  require("nvim-clipy.telescope").pick()
end, { desc = "Clipboard history" })

vim.keymap.set("n", "<leader>sY", function()
  require("nvim-clipy.browser").open()
end, { desc = "Clipboard history (bottom split)" })

This project is MIT licensed.