ClipMask

A Noctalia v4 plugin for privacy-first clipboard management with Vim-inspired navigation. Entries are masked with dots (••••) by default — only revealed on demand.

Best practice for clipboard security: Never leave sensitive data visible on screen. ClipMask keeps your clipboard contents hidden until you explicitly choose to reveal them.

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Features

• 🔒 Security-first — entries shown as •••••••• by default, zero visible secrets
• 👁 Reveal on demand — Ctrl+A cycles: fully masked → first 3 chars → fully revealed
• ⌨️ Vim-style navigation — j/k to move, / to search, d to delete
• 🖼️ Image support — image entries show thumbnails with an IMG badge
• 🔍 Live search — press / to filter entries in real-time
• 📋 Uses cliphist — integrates with your existing clipboard history
• 🎨 Full Noctalia theming — respects your colors and styles

Why ClipMask?

🛡️ Security & Privacy

Clipboard content is one of the most exposed attack surfaces on a desktop. Passwords, tokens, private keys, and personal messages all pass through the clipboard.

ClipMask follows the principle of least visibility:

• Entries are masked by default — no accidental exposure
• Reveal only what you need, when you need it
• Partial reveal mode shows just the first 3 characters — enough to identify an entry

🎯 Best Practices for Clipboard Security

1. Never leave clipboard content visible — masked entries prevent shoulder surfing
2. Use partial reveal — when scanning entries, first 3 chars + dots is enough to identify
3. Auto-refresh — panel always shows latest history
4. Delete sensitive entries — press d to remove any entry from history
5. Search don't scroll — use / to find entries without revealing everything

💡 Use Cases

Scenario	Why ClipMask helps
Streaming / Screen sharing	Viewers can't accidentally see your clipboard history
Public presentations	Keep API keys, passwords, and tokens hidden
Coffee shop / open office	Shoulder surfers can't read your clipboard
Developer workflow	Quickly find and paste code snippets without exposing everything
Password manager integration	Copy passwords safely, they stay masked in history

⌨️ Vim-Inspired Navigation

Key	Action
j / k	Navigate entries
/	Enter search mode
Ctrl+J / Ctrl+K	Navigate while searching
Esc / Ctrl+E	Exit search mode
Ctrl+A	Cycle mask: masked → partial → revealed
Enter	Copy selected entry
p	Show image preview (on IMG entries)
d / Del	Delete entry from history
Esc / Ctrl+E	Close panel / exit search
Backspace	Delete last character in search

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Installation

1. Make sure the plugin is in your plugins directory:

   ~/.config/noctalia/plugins/clipmask/
   

2. Open Noctalia Settings → Plugins

3. Find ClipMask in the list and toggle it ON

4. Add the bar widget:

   • Right-click your bar → Add widget
   • Search for "ClipMask" or scroll to find the eye-off icon
   • Click to add it

5. Click the bar widget to open the masked clipboard viewer

Requirements

• cliphist — the clipboard history daemon
• wl-clipboard — Wayland clipboard utilities

Install on Arch:

sudo pacman -S cliphist wl-clipboard

Make sure cliphist is running:

wl-paste --type text --watch cliphist store &
wl-paste --type image/png --watch cliphist store &

IPC Commands

# Toggle the ClipMask panel
qs -c noctalia-shell ipc call plugin:clipmask "toggle"

# Open panel
qs -c noctalia-shell ipc call plugin:clipmask "open"

# Close panel
qs -c noctalia-shell ipc call plugin:clipmask "close"

How it works

• Main.qml registers IPC handlers for the plugin
• Panel.qml runs cliphist list via Quickshell's Process component
• Each entry is parsed from the tab-delimited output and rendered in a ListView
• Text entries are masked with • characters until explicitly revealed
• Image entries are decoded via cliphist decode | base64 and shown as thumbnails
• Image entries have an IMG badge; press p on a selected IMG entry to view a 360×360 preview popup
• A LRU cache stores up to 20 decoded images to avoid re-decoding
• Copying pipes through cliphist decode | wl-copy for reliable binary/text handling

Credits

• Author: x0d7x
• Built for: Noctalia v4 (Quickshell-based)