One Tip a Week: Make SSH Feel Less Remote

This week's tip of the week is ssh-clipboard, a tool that gives your machines a shared clipboard over SSH.

If you spend any amount of time SSH'd into another machine, you've probably hit this.

You copy something locally, realize you need it on the remote machine, then start doing the usual dance of pasting it into a terminal, scp-ing a file, or finding some other workaround.

I actually liked this kind of workflow when I covered Herdr before, but ssh-clipboard gives you the clipboard part without needing Herdr at all.

Install it:

npm i -g ssh-clipboard

Then run:

ssh-clipboard

The first-run setup walks you through connecting another machine. If you use Tailscale, it can even discover compatible machines automatically. Otherwise, any passwordless SSH connection works.

Once it's running, it basically disappears.

Copy text on your Mac and paste it on your Linux box.

Copy an image remotely and paste it locally.

It also supports files and rich clipboard content, preserving the native clipboard formats instead of relying on terminal escape-sequence tricks.

And there isn't a cloud clipboard service sitting in the middle. The machines communicate peer-to-peer over the SSH connection you already trust.

You can check everything from the terminal too:

ssh-clipboard monitor

That gives you a live view of your connected machines and clipboard sync status.

If you SSH into dev boxes, homelab machines, or remote servers regularly, this is one of those tiny quality-of-life improvements that makes the remote machine feel a lot less remote.

Check out ssh-clipboard.

That's it! Short and sweet. Until the next one!

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