Clipboard

taiku maintains two clipboard histories that operate in parallel. Understanding the distinction between them is key to using clipboard effectively in multi-user sessions.

Local clipboard

Your local clipboard is a per-device history of everything you have copied from taiku terminals. It persists in your browser's local storage under the key taiku-clipboard and holds up to 50 entries.

Every time you copy text from a terminal, whether through Cmd+C, a right-click context menu, or the selection toolbar on mobile, taiku intercepts the copy and adds the text to your local history with a timestamp. This happens transparently; you do not need to do anything special.

Local clips are private to your device. Other session participants cannot see your local clipboard.

Global clipboard

The global clipboard is shared across all participants in the current session. When you copy text in taiku, it is automatically broadcast to other users through the workspace chat protocol. Other participants see the clip appear in their global clipboard history with your username attached.

Global clips are stored in memory and hold up to 50 entries. They are repopulated on reconnect from the chat history replay, so if you refresh the page you do not lose them for the duration of the session.

This automatic sharing is the key design decision: every local copy becomes a global broadcast. You do not need to explicitly "share" a clip. If you copy a stack trace in your terminal, everyone in the session immediately has access to it through their command palette.

The clipboard flow in practice

Here is a concrete workflow that shows how local and global clipboard work together:

You are debugging a production issue with a colleague. In your terminal, you run a command that produces a long error log. You select the critical portion, a 15-line stack trace, and copy it. Three things happen simultaneously:

The text goes to your system clipboard (normal OS copy behavior).
The text is added to your local taiku clipboard history.
The text is broadcast to the session's global clipboard, tagged with your name.

Your colleague, watching from a different browser, opens the command palette and switches to global clipboard mode. They see your stack trace at the top of the list, labeled with your name and a timestamp. They click it, preview the full text to make sure it is what they need, and paste it directly into their terminal where they are running a log analysis tool.

No external chat, no file sharing, and no "can you send me that?" The clipboard flow keeps everything inside the session.

Clipboard in the command palette

The command palette is the primary interface for browsing and using clipboard history. When you open it with Cmd+K:

Switch to local clipboard mode to see your personal copy history.
Switch to global clipboard mode to see everything that has been shared in the session.
Search by typing. The filter matches against clip text content.
Select a clip to see options: paste into the focused terminal, copy to system clipboard, preview the full content, or delete.
Clear the entire history (local or global) with the clear action.

Mobile clipboard

On mobile devices where hardware keyboards are not available, clipboard and selection actions are exposed through the touch keyboard bar. This bar provides copy, paste, and selection controls that make clipboard operations practical on phones and tablets.

The same local and global clipboard systems apply on mobile. Copies from the touch interface are tracked and broadcast just like desktop copies.