Wayland and text shortcuts

Support and Help
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Kubuntu 25.04 but also applies to all flavours on Wayland

After researching I have been unable to find a suitable application to easily paste a passage of text into a text editor or office application that was so easily achieved with built-in utilities or apps such as Autokey before Wayland.

With Wayland’s security features the built-in utilities have now been dropped from all desktop flavours.
There are some extremely convoluted work-arounds some have implemented such as Scott Gilbertson have worked out, but he lost me well before the end of the first page of his solution.

I have tried ydotool which I have been unable to get to work at all. Other “solutions” are way too complex to implement or just don’t work.

If anyone has been able to crack this please share as much as you can, it is a deal-breaker on Wayland for so many and needs to be urgently addressed before the high-speed implementation of Wayland INSTEAD of X11 is universal. I cannot emphasise how important this is to many of us, it will inevitably send many Linux users back into the arms of Microsoft.

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From which source/application are you trying to get the text to insert?

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Any. Just a general utility for creating snippets of text to be used again and again such as addresses and emails and frequently used phrases.
To be used by any desktop or cli application.

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Why do you need an app to past text into an editor? I think I do not understand your problem. May I ask you to describe your workflow (and objective) more precisely?

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The clipboard is usually owned by the wayland shell, so you need an implementation integrated with your specific compositor/shell, i.e. kwin for KDE or gnome-shell for GNOME … here is one for gnome for example:

That way you can have multiple text blocks sitting in your clipboard and paste them with a key combo into any window (including terminals) on your running desktop

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Another to try would be CopyQ.

https://copyq.readthedocs.io/en/latest/keyboard.html

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This in reply to Ogra:

No, that’s not what it is. Not the clipboard, it needs to be accessible by keystrokes specifically tied to various snippets of text blocks. In most people’s workflow that uses this utility, you need immediate access to several different lots of block text. The clipboard just doesn’t cut it.
In previous versions of Kubuntu for instance there is a utility that maps it easily see screenshots of a Kubuntu Noble example.

noble1
noble11920×1080 187 KB

noble2
noble21920×1080 213 KB

noble3
noble31920×1080 190 KB

I edited the address in the example to disguise my real home address.
Cheers and thanks all for your help. Tony

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@Norm24 Thanks for this suggestion, it certainly looks like it may do the job more effectively than all the others I’ve tried. I just hope it plays nicely with Wayland. I’ll give it a spin and report back later.
EDIT#1: Just taken it for a spin and it works quite well. It is not as easy as the original utility, but it’s something I’ll just maybe get to live with as I get more used to it. I haven’t been able to work out how to assign specific text snippets to particular keystrokes without having to go through the complete interface.
EDIT#2: I just cannot work out how to get a global shortcut to work. I have read the instructions until I am seeing random text behind my old eyeballs but not happening at the moment.

EDIT#3 It doesn’t look as though the global shortcut is going to work, but there is a workaround using the mouse to grab/paste into an app. That’ll do and it will probably be enough to enable a better workflow in Wayland, previously just not possible. I’ll mark it as solved.

Cheers Tony

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Well, regardless of what it exactly does or is, my point was that it needs to be implemented/integrated on the compositor level, so some standalone app will not do it, whatever will be there will be desktop specific in the end in the wayland world.

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@ogra What do you mean by compositor level?
From my limited understanding, there seems to be lots of layers in Linuxworld. See if I get it right- there is the primary kernel level, then a gui video or desktop level such as Wayland or X11, then an extra bit on top such as plasma, QT or GTK.
So which of these is a compositor level?
Tony

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Just my 2 cents, A compositor level in the context of Ubuntu and Wayland refers to the role and functionality of a compositor within the Wayland display server protocol. In Wayland, the compositor acts as the display server and is responsible for managing the display of graphical applications, handling input devices, and compositing the final image on the screen.

Unlike the X Window System (Xorg), where the display server and window manager are separate components, Wayland integrates these functions into the compositor.
This is as I understand it to date.
Please correct me if I’m wrong!

BTW CopyQ is also available as a flatpak.

com.github.hluk.copyq permissions:
    ipc                  gpg-agent            wayland      x11      dri
    file access [1]      dbus access [2]

    [1] xdg-config/kdeglobals:ro
    [2] com.canonical.AppMenu.Registrar, org.kde.KGlobalSettings, org.kde.StatusNotifierWatcher,
        org.kde.kconfig.notify, org.kde.kdeconnect


        ID                             Branch          Op          Remote          Download
 1. [✓] com.github.hluk.copyq          stable          i           flathub         2.9 MB / 3.6 MB

For those leary of PPA’s

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@1fallen Thanks for the explanation. In my Kubuntu 25.04 CopyQ is in the normal repository.

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So it is: :slight_smile:

 apt search copyq
copyq/questing 10.0.0-1 amd64
  Advanced clipboard manager with editing and scripting features

copyq-doc/questing,questing 10.0.0-1 all
  Documentation and examples for CopyQ - HTML format

copyq-plugins/questing 10.0.0-1 amd64
  Plugins for CopyQ

I use Arch so I’m more apt to install flatpaks for a more even work flow!
But Thanks for the heads up :wink: I can see it’s been available for a while now:

copyq | 3.2.0-1       | bionic/universe   | source, amd64, arm64, armhf, i386, ppc64el, s390x
 copyq | 3.10.0-1      | focal/universe    | source, amd64, arm64, armhf, ppc64el, riscv64, s390x
 copyq | 6.0.1-1       | jammy/universe    | source, amd64, arm64, armhf, ppc64el, riscv64, s390x
 copyq | 7.1.0-1build2 | noble/universe    | source, amd64, arm64, armhf, ppc64el, riscv64, s390x
 copyq | 9.0.0-1       | oracular/universe | source, amd64, arm64, armhf, ppc64el, riscv64, s390x
 copyq | 9.1.0-2build4 | plucky/universe   | source, amd64, arm64, armhf, ppc64el, riscv64, s390x
 copyq | 10.0.0-1      | questing/universe | source, amd64, arm64, armhf, ppc64el, riscv64, s390x
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Beyond @1fallen’s excellent explanation,

In short form, on KDE your compositor is kwin, on GNOME it is gnome-shell … (not sure what LxQt and XFCE will finalize on, AFAIK the jury is still out there) :wink:

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Thanks to all of you, and I’ve learned something. Mind you at my age how long I’ll remember is anyone’s guess!

Cheers Tony

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