mptre/yank

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

1707 stars · 48 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

yank is a small C command-line utility that reads stdin, displays an interactive selection interface of fields (matched by regex or delimiters), and pipes the chosen field to a clipboard command like xsel or pbcopy. It provides a terminal-agnostic, mouse-free way to copy terminal output.

Use cases

• copy terminal output to clipboard without the mouse
• select a field from a csv file and copy it
• yank an environment variable key or value
• kill a process by selecting its pid from ps output
• copy build errors from make output
• use clipboard over ssh in headless environments

When to choose

• you want a terminal-agnostic clipboard helper that works without tmux or screen
• you frequently copy fields from command output and hate reaching for the mouse
• you need a tiny, fast unix-style tool that pipes into xsel, pbcopy, or any stdin command

When to avoid

• you want a full clipboard manager with history
• you need a graphical selection UI or mouse interaction
• you only work inside a terminal multiplexer that already provides copy mode

Facets

cli-tool · maturity stable

cli developer-tools terminal-ui developer-tools bsd cli cross-platform clipboard terminal-output selection-interface c command-line linux macos

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="mptre/yank")