Strata/README.md

Strata

A fast, stutter-free clipboard manager for GNOME Shell.

All heavy work (hashing, decoding, storage, search, thumbnails) lives in a Rust daemon. The GNOME Shell extension only renders UI and forwards events over D-Bus, so the compositor is never blocked, even with thousands of items.

Requires a companion daemon. Installing from GNOME Extensions is only half the setup. See Installing the daemon.

The motivation behind this is explained in the technical blog post Rethinking the GNOME clipboard issues

Features

Content types. Strata captures and previews:

• Text (UTF-8). When an app offers both rich and plain text, Strata stores the plain text rather than styled HTML.
• URLs are shown link-styled, with the hostname as a subtitle.
• Colors: hex values (#rgb / #rrggbb) get a color swatch.
• Images: PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP, BMP, TIFF, ICO, shown as thumbnails. Decoding and resizing happen once, in the daemon, at copy time.
• Files: file-manager copy/cut (URI lists, e.g. from Nautilus).

Unknown MIME types are ignored (a strict allowlist).

Search.

• Full-text search over the entire stored history, backed by SQLite FTS5.
• Prefix matching, diacritic-insensitive (cafe matches café).
• Text only; images and binaries are not indexed.

Appearance.

• Light and dark styling follows the GNOME Shell automatically, matching the rest of the shell UI.
• Configurable panel position (top/center/bottom by left/center/right), width, and maximum height.
• Optional "move an item to the top" when you paste it.

Performance.

• All hashing, decoding, storage, search, and thumbnailing run in the Rust daemon, off the compositor's main loop.
• Lazy loading: the panel loads one page of history at a time and fetches more on scroll; thumbnails are fetched on demand and cached on disk; search renders a page at a time. The full table never sits in memory.
• Deduplication: copying the same content twice moves the existing entry to the top (blake3 content hash) instead of adding a duplicate.

Reliability.

• SQLite in WAL mode with atomic upserts; history survives a crash.
• The extension supervises the daemon, respawning it with exponential backoff. Only one daemon runs at a time; a second exits rather than contend for the bus name.
• Configurable history limit (default 200, up to 2000); oldest items are pruned automatically.

Privacy and safety.

• Password-manager aware: entries marked sensitive (the x-kde-passwordManagerHint used by KeePassXC and others) are never stored.
• App exclusions: items copied while a listed app has focus are skipped. The default list covers common password managers (1Password, KeePassXC, Bitwarden, and others).
• Size caps: text and image payloads larger than a configurable limit (1 MB and 5 MB by default) are not stored.
• Never executes clipboard content: no shell exec, no launch_uri, no markup parsing; paste-back only writes to the clipboard.

Controls.

• Top-bar icon and popup panel, opened with a configurable shortcut (default Super+Shift+V).
• Keyboard navigation (arrow keys, Esc to close), click-outside to dismiss, per-row delete, and "Clear all".

How it looks

A responsive panel that drops down from the top bar and follows the GNOME shell's look.

Architecture

Strata is two components, and you need both for it to work:

Component	Language	Role
strata-daemon/	Rust + tokio + zbus	Storage (SQLite + FTS5), dedup, thumbnails, D-Bus service dev.edu4rdshl.Strata
strata@edu4rdshl.dev/	GJS (GNOME Shell extension)	Top-bar panel, search UI, paste-back, clipboard ingest

The extension auto-connects to the daemon on enable. If the daemon is managed by systemd (or another init system), the extension detects it and skips spawning its own copy. If no daemon is running, the extension looks for strata-daemon in $PATH and spawns it directly.

GNOME Shell (GJS)  ──D-Bus──▶  strata-daemon  ──▶  SQLite (~/.local/share/strata)
                                       │
                                       └──▶  thumbnails (~/.cache/strata)

Installing the daemon

Strata is two parts: the GNOME Shell extension and a small background daemon (strata-daemon) that does the storage, search, and thumbnailing. Installing the extension from GNOME Extensions is only half the setup; without the daemon the extension does nothing.

Install the daemon with whichever fits your system:

• Arch (AUR): paru -S strata-daemon (or strata-daemon-git for the latest main).

• From source:

  git clone https://github.com/Edu4rdSHL/Strata.git
  cd Strata
  make install-daemon    # builds and installs to ~/.local/bin
  

  Make sure ~/.local/bin is in your $PATH.

Then log out and back in (Wayland) or Alt+F2 → r (X11). The extension finds strata-daemon in $PATH and starts it automatically; no separate service is needed.

For distro packages and the systemd user service, see Install.

Requirements

• GNOME Shell 50. Older releases may work if built from source but are not tested or supported.
• strata-daemon binary in $PATH (see Install below)
• Rust 1.74+ (build only)
• glib-compile-schemas (from glib2-devel / libglib2.0-dev-bin)
• SQLite is bundled via rusqlite, no system dep needed

Install

Arch Linux (AUR)

Strata is split into a daemon package and an extension package; install both. Two channels are available -- pick one channel and don't mix them:

• Stable (tagged releases): strata-daemon + gnome-shell-extension-strata
• Git (latest main): strata-daemon-git + gnome-shell-extension-strata-git

# Stable
paru -S strata-daemon gnome-shell-extension-strata

# or Git
paru -S strata-daemon-git gnome-shell-extension-strata-git

(Use your AUR helper of choice, e.g. yay instead of paru.) Then log out / log back in (Wayland) or Alt+F2 → r (X11) and enable:

gnome-extensions enable strata@edu4rdshl.dev

The daemon is installed to /usr/bin/strata-daemon (already in $PATH), so the extension finds it automatically.

From source (local build)

git clone https://github.com/Edu4rdSHL/Strata.git
cd Strata

# Build and install the daemon binary to ~/.local/bin
make install-daemon

# Install the GNOME Shell extension
make install

Make sure ~/.local/bin is in your $PATH, then log out / log back in (Wayland) or Alt+F2 → r (X11) and enable:

gnome-extensions enable strata@edu4rdshl.dev

Via systemd user service (distro packages / manual)

Distro packages install the daemon binary to /usr/bin/strata-daemon and the systemd unit from contrib/systemd/strata-daemon.service to /usr/lib/systemd/user/. Enable it once:

systemctl --user enable --now strata-daemon

Then install and enable the extension as above. The extension detects the running daemon and will not spawn a second copy.

Pack for extensions.gnome.org

make pack          # produces strata@edu4rdshl.dev.shell-extension.zip (JS only)

Uninstall

gnome-extensions disable strata@edu4rdshl.dev
rm -rf ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/strata@edu4rdshl.dev
rm -rf ~/.local/share/strata ~/.cache/strata    # also wipes history

Other desktops?

The daemon is desktop-agnostic. It speaks plain D-Bus and runs anywhere the session bus does. Any client (KDE applet, CLI tool, your own script) can drive it. See strata-daemon/README.md for the wire protocol and a busctl example.

The shipped UI is a GNOME Shell extension. Ports to other desktops only need a new front-end against the same D-Bus interface.

Deeper reading

• ARCHITECTURE.md: design goals, process model, storage schema, FTS5 details, concurrency, security boundary.
• strata-daemon/README.md: D-Bus interface reference and standalone usage.
• strata@edu4rdshl.dev/README.md: extension internals.

AI Policy Disclosure

Parts of this codebase and documentation were written with the assistance of AI tools. This is the policy we follow and will continue to follow: every line of code and every document produced with AI assistance is rigorously reviewed by a human before being published. No AI-generated output is committed without understanding, verification, and approval by the project author.

License

GPL-3.0-or-later.