Here, I’m blogging with markdown and Jekyll, and so I wrote a program that creates markdown file and adds the things that Jekyll wants to see.

So, to create a new blog post, there’s a two-step process. First, I type the command:

$ new_post.pl -t 'Want Access to Clipboard' 
/home/jacoby/local/dev/jacoby.github.io/_posts/2017-11-02-want-access-to-clipboard.markdown
title:  "Want Access to Clipboard"
date:   "2017-11-02 16:51:37 -0400"
author: "Dave Jacoby"
categories:

What I then do is copy the long path to the markdown file and paste it again, opening it in my editor of choice:

$ code /home/jacoby/local/dev/jacoby.github.io/_posts/2017-11-02-want-access-to-clipboard.markdown

This is fine, if I only blog on occasion, but I am trying to do this more often, so I want to use the awesome power of computing to help me.

I use xsel to interact with the clipboard, with these aliases.

alias c='xsel -i -b '
alias p='xsel -p -b '

I would rather be able to do something like the following to get the right file into my editor.

$ code `p`

I have just installed xclip, which is what the Perl Clipboard module uses, and it doesn’t by default use the clipboard buffer.

I am considering a module that works like Clipboard but gives better configuration so you can be sure you’re dealing with the correct buffer. Or, maybe just a personal fork.