Getting access to rich-text data from the clipboard (on Linux)

Jan. 26, 2025, 8:19 p.m.

I've recently noticed that i.e. on Slack, if I right click a channel and click "Copy name", and then paste that into a Slack message, I get the name of the channel, but if I paste it into GitHub or Google Docs, I get a rich text link, with the name of the channel, and a link to the channel.

This is really nice behaviour, but with the way my team does standups and my Neovim plugin for standup updates, I wanted to make sure that I'm able to get the same functionality myself.

Digging into this via StackOverflow, it looks like the xclip command has the --target flag:

% xclip -o --target text/html
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><a href="https://github.com/deepmap/oapi-codegen">oapi-codegen</a>%

This is returned as an alternative to the default plain-text output:

% xclip -o
oapi-codegen

You can also list the options available for outputs with -t TARGETS:

% xclip -o -t TARGETS
TIMESTAMP
TARGETS
MULTIPLE
text/html
text/_moz_htmlcontext
text/_moz_htmlinfo
UTF8_STRING
COMPOUND_TEXT
TEXT
STRING
text/plain;charset=utf-8
text/plain
text/x-moz-url-priv