`clipboarder watch`¶

Stream newly-captured items as JSON Lines on stdout. One row per line. Runs forever (or until SIGTERM).

Synopsis¶

clipboarder watch [--kind K]

Options¶

Flag	Default	Description
`-k`, `--kind <K>`	`all`	Only emit items of this kind.

Output¶

Each new clipboard item produces one line of compact JSON:

{"id":17,"kind":"url","content":"https://anthropic.com","preview":"https://anthropic.com","source_app":"Safari","source_app_id":"com.apple.Safari","meta":"anthropic.com","image_path":null,"pinned":false,"size":21,"created_at":1778619961050,"last_used_at":1778619961050}
{"id":18,"kind":"code","content":"…","preview":"…","source_app":"VS Code","source_app_id":"com.microsoft.VSCode","meta":"typescript","image_path":null,"pinned":false,"size":48,"created_at":1778619971200,"last_used_at":1778619971200}

Polling interval: 500 ms.

How it works¶

watch reads the highest id in your selected kind, sleeps 500 ms, then queries for any rows with a higher id. New rows are sorted by id and emitted in order. There's no event subscription — the CLI doesn't need the GUI to be running.

Examples¶

# Log everything to a JSONL file
clipboarder watch > ~/clipboard.jsonl &

# Notify on every new URL (using `terminal-notifier`)
clipboarder watch --kind url | while read -r line; do
  url=$(echo "$line" | jq -r .content)
  terminal-notifier -title "New URL captured" -message "$url"
done

# Pipe new code snippets into a tagged file
clipboarder watch --kind code | jq -r '"--- " + .meta + "\n" + .content' >> code-stream.txt

Exit / cleanup¶

watch keeps running until you Ctrl-C it or send SIGTERM. Buffered output is flushed on every emit, so consumers see new lines immediately.

If clipboarder isn't running, watch still works — it reads directly from the SQLite DB. But you won't get new rows unless something else (the GUI watcher, or clipboarder add) is inserting.

clipboarder watch¶