Strata/README.md

<p align="center">
  <img src="assets/icon.svg" alt="Strata logo" width="96" height="96">
</p>

# 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.

The motivation behind this is explained in the technical blog post [Rethinking the GNOME clipboard issues](https://edu4rdshl.dev/posts/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

The idea is to have a simple but responsive UI that fits into the project's goals. Actually, Strata looks like it:

<img width="1470" height="1227" alt="image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/07a17d08-4d7f-4afb-bafc-9346814e376a" />

## Architecture

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

| Component | Language | Role |
|---|---|---|
| [`strata-daemon/`](strata-daemon/) | Rust + tokio + zbus | Storage (SQLite + FTS5), dedup, thumbnails, D-Bus service `dev.edu4rdshl.Strata` |
| [`strata@edu4rdshl.dev/`](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)
```

## 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`

```sh
# 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:

```sh
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)

```sh
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:

```sh
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:

```sh
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

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

## Uninstall

```sh
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`](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`](ARCHITECTURE.md): design goals, process model,
  storage schema, FTS5 details, concurrency, security boundary.
- [`strata-daemon/README.md`](strata-daemon/README.md): D-Bus interface
  reference and standalone usage.
- [`strata@edu4rdshl.dev/README.md`](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.