Show HN: Pbproxy – Send your clipboard anywhere you can ssh (opens in new tab)

Just for other people arriving from Google who might think this is too much work, it seems to be enough for my use case to just type

    ssh user@host "cat foo.txt" | pbcopy

from my Mac terminal.

This is what I was hinting at with:

> One could perhaps set something up to forward a connection to a local daemon […] [but complexity]

Wireguard is the same problem, just with a layer of indirection. (I've tried WG exactly to try to simplify the networking!) Now instead of SSH connecting, it's Wireguard.

You can make some headway with this, but it's a bit painful. You need some fixed presence on the Internet, somewhere, like a server. That can be done, but now you're setting up routing, etc. Or paying Tailscale. It rubs me a bit of the wrong way, since the ISPs job was to provide end-to-end connectivity, and ISPs as a whole are falling down on that … I shouldn't need to build a shadow network in the IPv6 private space …

(And again, we breach the "it isn't worth it" complexity barrier for a cross machine clipboard transfer…)

That only adds a layer of indirection to the same problem. You can refer to your laptop by hostname, but something have to update the hostname's record when the laptop moves about. That could be a daemon on the laptop [yada yada] but now you've added a ton of complexity. (And there's still the problem of NAT: your laptop might not be on the Internet.)