What is this?

pbi is a command line utility for the mac that copies stdin to the pasteboard when stdin is piped or redirected. When stdin is a terminal, it pastes the current pasteboard content.

why is this better?

pbcopy and pbpaste` already exist, but to their detriment, they're separate binaries. We can just have one command because the process can detect if it's being used as input or output.

Oh, it's also image aware.

The macOS pasteboard has type information, so that you can paste formatting as well as the text. Or you can copy images. With pbpaste though, you can't use pbpaste to dump the image on your pasteboard to where you are in the terminal, because pbpaste (and pbcopy) just silently fail if they don't find text.

So you can't right click, copy image, and then pbpaste that to a file in the terminal.

With pbi, you can.

Installing

From crates.io:

cargo install pbi --locked

From a checkout:

cargo install --path . --locked

Usage

Show command help:

Options:

• --debug prints clipboard and terminal diagnostics to stderr.
• -h, --help prints usage and exits without clipboard access.

Right click on an image in your web browser, copy image, and then your terminal, do:

or

There's also the other direction, so you can

and then ⌘+N into preview.app will get you the image in preview.

Also you can do

cat nyan.png | pbi

(`pbi < nyan.png` if you must)

If you use a modern terminal that has Kitty graphics protocol or sixel support, with an image on your paste board you can also do:

and the image will display directly in your terminal.

If you override TERM because of TERMCAP distribution delay, and terminal image auto-detection fails, force the protocol explicitly:

export PBI_IMAGE_PROTOCOL=sixel

Pasteboard vs clibpard

Fun fact!

Apple’s APIs call it a pasteboard (NSPasteboard, UIPasteboard) rather than a clipboard. The term comes from old publishing workflows where designers literally cut out text and images and pasted them onto layout boards before printing. Copy/paste wasn’t originally a computer metaphor, it came from the world of publishing.