Share Clip

Share Clip is a small utility program to share the text portion of the clipboard between PC, Mac and Linux computers. This allows you to copy and paste between two computers the same as you would on one computer.

Share Clip is distributed as freeware. Source is RealBasic 2005, which cross compiles to Windows, Mac and Linux. If you have RB and want the source, send me an email.

If you have questions or comments, I can be contacted by email at bnej@mac.com.

Redhat and Debian packages for Linux are available thanks to Reed Hedges.

Download Version 1.2

• 1.2 Mac OS X Disk Image
• 1.2 Windows Installer
• 1.2 Linux binary tar/gz not tested
• 1.1 Linux RPM package out of date
• 1.1 Debian Linux package out of date

Changes 1.1 - 1.2

• Proper UNICODE support across all platforms! This means you can copy smart quotes, French quote characters, euro signs, math symbols etc. back and forth between Windows and OS X without losing them along the way. Note that your application needs to support these characters too, some old applications don't support extended character sets. Text in the normal ASCII range should work as normal regardless.
• I have set the font on the clipboard text preview to Courier, as the default windows system font does not support most UTF8 characters. Hopefully this will not cause any issues.
• The Share Clip window now shows the local IP address, so you can easily see the address you need to connect to.
• Please be aware that I have not tested the Linux build - if you have problems with it, please let me know.

Changes 1.0 - 1.1

• More robust connect/disconnect on all platforms
• Umlauts and other accented characters should now be transferred correctly.
• Will now minimise correctly under Windows
• Line endings will be translated when copying blocks of text between platforms.
• Connect Dialog now has a history, which stores up to 10 recent IP addresses/computer names.
• Reduced the polling rate on the clipboard to .5 sec instead of .2

Installation

Mac Double click the dmg file to mount it, then drag the Share Clip application to your applications folder.

Windows Double click the installer and follow on screen instructions

Linux Untar with tar xzvf shareclip-linux-12.tar.gz, copy the ShareClip binary to /usr/local/bin or wherever you prefer. The application depends on GTK 2, but should be otherwise self contained.

On Linux, ensure that the READ flags as well as execute are set. The binary file contains resources so it must be able to read itself! Use "chmod 755 ShareClip" to set read + execute for all users.

Instructions

Start the application on each computer. Once both are running, click the Connect button, then enter the host name or IP address of the other computer. If the connection is successful, the status line will now show "Connected to address". The clipboard will now be synchronised between the two computers.

The program works by polling the clipboard every 500 ms - twice per second - and sending a network message when it changes. Only the text portion of the clipboard is ever sent, since handling binary clipboard data between platforms becomes a much more complex task. The program will be listening for a connection any time it is not connected, and will only accept one connection. It uses the TCP port 7582.

Contact

If you have questions or comments, I can be contacted by email at bnej@mac.com.