pasty

README

Pasty CLI

Pasty is a macro tool built for your clipboard. In many editors, you can define macros to handle text manipulation, but they are limited and editor specific. With pasty, you can have powerful macros tied to the text on your clipboard in any editor you wish.

If you're like me, you have found yourself often needing to do some edits on the text your working on. For instance, you need to decode this base64 text. So you:

1. Copy the text
2. Find an online base64 decoder
3. Paste your text into that tool
4. Click the button
5. Copy the output text
6. Go back to your editor and paste it in

With Pasty, you simply

1. Copy the text
2. Run "pasty base64decode"
3. Paste the output back to your editor

If you're using an editor that understands stdin/stdout, like vim, you can simply select the text and run: :'<,'>!pasty base64decode

Installation

Using go install

go install github.com/Mnrikard/pasty@latest

Build from source

git clone https://github.com/Mnrikard/pasty.git
cd pasty
go install ./

Install the tab completion for your terminal (Optional)

Once you have pasty installed, you can run:

Powershell

pasty completion powershell > $HOME/.pastycompletion.ps1
echo ". $HOME/.pastycompletion.ps1" >> $PROFILE

Posix

pasty completion [bash|fish|zsh] > ~/.pastycompletion.sh
chmod +x ~/.pastycompletion.sh
echo '. ~/.pastycompletion.sh` >> ~/.zshrc

where ~/.zshrc is either your zshrc, bashrc, or fishrc file

Then, restart your shell for the settings to take effect

Security

Pasty has zero ability to reach a network. There is no telemetry, no phone-home, nothing to compromise the security of the text on your clipboard. This is by design. Even the plugins you write for pasty only have basic math/string manipulation capabilities.

Usage

Clipboard

The primary usage of pasty is to modify the text on your clipboard. So just copy something and run a command to modify the text on your clipboard. I find it useful to use the quick command interpreters built into most desktop environments

• Windows: Bring up the run box by typing "Win+R" and you can type in your pasty command quickly
• KDE: Alt+F2 brings up a command interpreter
• Gnome: Alt+F2 as well
• MacOs: can finder do this? I don't know, I don't have a mac

Or, if you're running from a terminal, you can take advantage of the tab completion available there.

StdIn/StdOut

Pasty can pipe input from stdin in your terminal. Just run your output through pasty to execute the macros on your standard input instead of your clipboard

Example:

cat myfile | pasty sort | pasty dedup > sortedSingles

User defined functions

You can store commonly used macros and chains of macros in your ~/.config/pasty/user_defined.json file. The syntax for new UDFs is:

	{
		"name":"nameOfMacro", //define the name of the macro here, you'll call it with `pasty udf nameOfMacro`
		"commands":[//a list of commands to execute in the order defined
			{
				"name":"rep",//The name of the pasty function to run
				"args":["{{replaceWhat}}", "b"] //The list of arguments passed to the function
				//You can create parameters to pass into your UDF with double-handlebars
				//You'll need to define them below
			}
		],
		"parameters":[//a list of parameters to pass to the UDF
			{
				"name":"replaceWhat",//the name should match the handlebar replacement text above
				"defaultValue":null
			}
		]
	}

Plugins

If User Defined Functions don't solve your problem and you need more control over how to manipulate your text, you can create your own plugin.

Plugins are Lua files stored in your home directory under ~/.config/pasty/plugins/. The version of Lua currently supported is 5.1, and you have access to string and math functions, but no access to spawn processes or break out of the sandbox.

The minimal structure of these applications is:

function process(input, params)
    return "new text"
    -- input is the text to manipulate
    -- params is a table with all user input params
end

Where the input is a string and the output is also a string. You can manipulate that string within your process function and create cool new text modifications.

Where is the old nodejs app? Can I still install from npm?

Due to security concerns around how plugins were handled in the old nodejs app and because of the inherent slowness in interpreted code, it was decided to move to this app written in go and using sandboxed Lua plugins. The old nodejs app is still available on npm (albeit outdated) and the source code is available on the LegacyNodeJs release on github.