I use this everyday

Copying and pasting through the terminal becomes dramatically more useful when the clipboard is wired into command-line workflows—especially for Linux and Windows users running WSL. The core idea is to install a small clipboard utility on the machine you’re working in, then use two terminal commands—one to push text into the system clipboard and one to pull text out—so you can pipe files, command output, or whole text blocks directly into other tools.

On macOS, clipboard commands already exist (PB copy / PB paste), but they aren’t available by default on Linux or Windows. The workaround uses a command-line program called xclip (installed via apt-get) to create equivalents: PB copy becomes a command that sends stdin to the clipboard, and PB paste becomes a command that outputs the clipboard contents to stdout. With those in place, terminal operations that normally end in a file or a screen can instead end up in the clipboard. That enables workflows like piping a large transcript into the clipboard, copying an entire article from a browser into a terminal pipeline, or feeding clipboard text into another command (the transcript mentions using a summarization tool called “fabric” as an example).

To avoid typing long commands every time, the instructions define shell aliases in ~/.bashrc. The aliases are named PB copy and PB paste and map to xclip’s “input from stdin” and “output to stdout” modes. After saving the updated bashrc and reloading it with source ~/.bashrc, a quick test—echoing a line and piping it into PB copy, then piping PB paste back into the terminal—confirms the clipboard round-trip works.

The second half tackles a more advanced scenario: copying and pasting while logged into a remote Linux server from a local Linux/WSL environment. Clipboard access doesn’t automatically carry over to another machine, so the remote server must be prepared. Two requirements are emphasized: xclip must be installed on the remote server, and X11 forwarding must be enabled so a program can run on the remote host while displaying its “graphics” (and clipboard-related behavior) through the local display. The transcript walks through checking /etc/ssh/sshd_config for X11Forwarding yes (and ensuring it isn’t commented out), restarting SSH if changes are needed, and adding the same bash aliases on the remote server because aliases defined locally won’t exist there.

Finally, the SSH connection uses a special flag—ssh -X—to force X11 forwarding. With that in place, the same PB copy / PB paste aliases work on the remote server, enabling clipboard-based copy/paste even across machines. The result is a practical, repeatable terminal habit that turns clipboard operations into pipeline-friendly building blocks rather than manual copy/paste steps.