Okay, dull even by my standards.

I have a bash function which I use to generate a meeting URL for our jitsi video conferencing system.

I type the function name in the terminal, and it generates the URL. Nice and simple.

I typically need this to paste into a calendar invitation, or into a chat on another platform, so I don’t want the output in the terminal but on a clipboard from which I can paste it.

If I were using X, I would use xcopy, but this is not available, because I am using Wayland.

I’m not sure if there is a native way of doing this in Wayland, but the package wl-clipboard seems to do the job nicely. (Here’s the man page.)

If I’ve captured the value of the meeting URL into $MEETINGURL, I can just add it to the clipboard for pasting with wl-copy $MEETINGURL.

Even better would be string expansion when I type “meetingurl” into the calendar invitation, so that it automatically runs the script to generate the URL and pastes it in. I did that in macOS using aText before a macOS security feature, Secure Input, basically made it unusable. I would use espanso, which does much the same for Linux, but it does not support Wayland yet. However, fingers crossed, Wayland support is coming to espanso soon…