Send clipboard contents to a tailnet machine with Taildrop

[geirolafs]

The Tailscale panel can send files to a machine with Taildrop (#6375); this adds the natural sibling: sending whatever is on the clipboard. It's the fastest way to get a snippet, a screenshot, or a copied batch of files onto your phone or another machine on the tailnet.

Sending

Each machine row gets a clipboard button next to the file-send button, v sends to the selected machine from the keyboard, and omarchy tailscale send-clipboard <machine> does the same from the terminal. What goes over depends on what the clipboard holds:

• An image goes over as itself (clipboard-HHMMSS.png, or its actual image type).
• Files copied in a file manager are recognized by their text/uri-list offer and handed to the regular omarchy-tailscale-send, so the files themselves arrive rather than a text file of file:// URLs.
• Anything else goes as a small text file the receiver can open or copy from.

Guard rails: a clipboard marked x-kde-passwordManagerHint is refused — the same marker the shell's clipboard history refuses to record. An empty clipboard is refused rather than delivering a zero-byte file. Contents are staged before the transfer starts, so a paste that dies mid-stream can't deliver an empty file and then blame Taildrop. A transfer still running after ~2 seconds announces itself in flight, so a send to a sleeping phone doesn't look like nothing happened. Notifications never echo the clipboard contents.

Receiving

On an Omarchy receiver, omarchy-tailscale-receive announces a clipboard text drop as click-to-copy: answering the notification puts the text straight on that machine's clipboard, while the file still lands in ~/Downloads as the recovery path. Oversized drops (>256KB) are announced as the plain files they have effectively become. Together the two ends give clipboard push between Omarchy machines; on phones and other platforms it arrives as a normal Taildrop file.

Why not omarchy share clipboard?

The LocalSend share is complementary: this targets a specific machine from the panel you're already in, reaches the whole tailnet across the internet (no shared LAN, no LocalSend open on the receiver), and handles image clipboards (#8340 tracks the LocalSend path sending empty files for those). Clipboard sharing across devices has also been asked for in #8451.

Testing

• test/shell.d/tailscale-send-clipboard-test.sh (new): text/image/svg+xml naming, payload integrity, uri-list delegation with percent-decoded paths and stale-list fallback to text, password-manager refusal, both empty-clipboard shapes (no offer, empty string), paste-failure error attribution, in-flight and completion toasts, transfer-error surfacing.
• test/shell.d/tailscale-receive-test.sh (extended): click-to-copy announcement, the file still landing in downloads, contents never echoed into the notification, a renamed name-clash keeping its click-to-copy, and the oversized fallback.
• ./test/cli and the tailscale shell tests pass.

Verified live on my tailnet: text and image clipboards sent from the panel, the v key, and the CLI to an iPhone, including the in-flight toast on a slow transfer. The receiver's click-to-copy path is covered by the tests; it can't be exercised on a single machine since Taildrop won't send to itself.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

https://claude.ai/code/session_01VRQZFePBavwQkzvAzGAR1K