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Support timeout while copying to clipboard

Submitted by Volkan Yazici

Assigned to Mike Massonnet

Link to original bug (#16613)

Description

Created attachment 9659 The copyq script used.

I'd like to have an option to copy content into the clipboard with a certain timeout, when reached will "securely" wipe out the copied content and the associated clipboard history entry with it. This is a pretty common practice with password managers:

  1. You browse to gmail.com and type your e-mail address.
  2. You open your password manager, type there your primary password, and click on the "gmail" entry account to get its password copied into the clipboard with a, say, 30s timeout.
  3. You go back to your browser and type CTRL+V.
  4. After 30s, the copied content gets wiped out and cleared from the history.

To provide a tangible example, my password manager of choice is pass (https://www.passwordstore.org/) which also happens to have a pretty popular Go implementation too (https://www.gopass.pw/). Via pass, I can easily paste my gmail password into the clipboard:

$ pass copy gmail

The problem is that the copied password will stay there until some other content overrides it. Worse, it will be kept in your clipboard history. In an ideal world, one would rather have it wiped out in a matter of seconds. To work around the problem, I use copyq (https://hluk.github.io/CopyQ/) as my clipboard manager and configure pass to leverage it while copying content into the clipboard. Thanks to copyqs extensible scripting support, I use a script to inject the content into the clipboard with a certain timeout: pass-extension-copyq (https://github.com/vy/pass-extension-copyq). While this serves my purpose, 1) it is not secure (memory area is not wiped out) and 2) requires manual plumbing for something which I think should be shipped as a feature by the default clipboard governance.

I am not certain whether this is an Xfce problem or a xclip one, or both. Nevertheless, I'd like to see it working in Xfce -- hence this bug report on Xfce board. If anybody would want to pick this up, in addition to being deeply appreciated, I can fund that brave soul too. (Please e-mail me for the details on bounty.)

Attachment 9659, "The copyq script used.":
copyq.bash

Version: 1.6.0