[ody4242]

There are some exotic scenarios, where copy-paste is the good(fast) solution. For example, one of my clients can be accessed via a VPN. Once I'm on the VPN, I have to start their VDI. Inside the VDI, I need to start another VPN, that then allows me to open a Putty session to a bastion host, that I can use to reach my destination cluster. Believe it or not, they don't want to make it simpler.

Copy/paste works flawlessly through the VDI into the putty session, so I usually just uuencode my blob, and copy it to destination cluster and uudecode there, instead of uploading the file to the VDI, then pscp to the bastion host, and then scp to the destination cluster. (I know of zmodem, port forwarding and such, none of this is allowed...)

[ntoskrnl]

That sounds horrific. I wonder if anyone has built a TCP tunnel that works over shared clipboard? :)

[sandermvanvliet]

Not sure but I’ve made something more ugly.

Once upon a time at $workplace we had a production and development LAN and we had two PC’s sitting on our desks, one for prod and one for dev.

Now there was a special SMB share to move stuff between the two networks but trying to copy something from one Pc to the other was tedious.

So of course I wrote a magic clipboard utility that used a file on that SMB share as the clipboard “storage”. Running the utility on both PCs allowed me to use copy-paste between the two PCs…

[funcDropShadow]

I have once worked for a customer where other freelancer had developed a special proxy. The customer required working in a hermetically closed vpn environment even to access the test systems. Whitelisting a single web page cost an unreasonable amount of budget and took days to weeks. Therefore someone had decided to run the vpn inside a virtual machine, and developed an http proxy that consisted of two processes, one running inside the VM and one outside. Now, you gan guess how they exchanged requests and responses. That whole setup was surprisingly usable.

[johnwalkr]

copy/paste really is a great tool. I bought a Windows gaming PC during the pandemic, and my other systems are Macs. I started to use barrier (a multi-platform software KVM-like keyboard and mouse sharing thing) and was pleasantly surprised to learn that it shares the clipboard across all of my PCs, and my Macs in turn also share the clipboard to my iphone. This works in both directions. It's convenient to the point that using multiple PCs with multiple operating systems is barely different than using one PC with 2 monitors. I travel a lot for work and this feature also lets me use my personal laptop as a slightly limited second screen for my work laptop. Total gamechanger for free.