ClipVault

ClipVault is a clipboard manager for Ubuntu and Linux that remembers everything you copy — text, links, colours, images, GIFs — and lets you get any of it back without leaving the keyboard. It's built to be invisible until you need it, sitting at roughly 10–20 MB of RAM and 0% CPU while idle.

The core#

The backend is Rust. It watches the X11 clipboard through XFIXES over thread channels — an event-driven approach rather than polling — and it's careful about the awkward parts: it rebuilds itself cleanly when the X server restarts, and it suppresses its own copies so it never loops on itself. Everything is stored in SQLite in WAL mode, with SHA-256 content hashing to deduplicate entries in real time, WebP thumbnails for images, and history grouped by day in your own timezone.

The interface#

The Rust core talks to a React 19 frontend over a typed IPC layer, and wires up the OS bits you'd expect from a native app: a system-tray icon, a global hotkey (Ctrl+Alt+V), an autostart daemon and a single-instance guard. The dashboard is a fast, dark, keyboard-first UI that uses @tanstack/react-virtual to stay smooth even scrolling through an enormous clipboard history.