Two of them, actually. Spreadsheet cells pasted into a chat arrive as one flat string and the model guesses at the column boundaries; terminal output copied out of a coding agent arrives with padding and hard wraps. Reading the clipboard directly fixes the first, and asking the assistant to copy a command fixes the second. The PRIMARY selection support is Linux only — passing `selection="primary"` on macOS or Windows returns a clear error rather than silently reading the wrong buffer.
A clipboard bridge. Instead of pasting into a chat box and losing the structure, the server reads the system clipboard directly — including the HTML that spreadsheet apps put there — and returns a real Markdown table, JSON or CSV. It writes the other way too, putting clean text onto the clipboard for you to paste.
- `clipboard_paste` reads whatever is on the clipboard — tables, text, code, JSON, URLs, images — with `include_schema=true` to append inferred column types
- `clipboard_copy` writes text back, taking an optional `mime_type` (`text/plain` by default, also `text/html`, `text/rtf`, `image/svg+xml`)
- `clipboard_copy_markdown` puts both rendered HTML and the source on the clipboard, so Slack, Gmail and Notion get rich text while a terminal gets the markup
- `clipboard_copy_image` writes a PNG or JPEG from base64 with no re-encoding, validating magic bytes against the declared type
- `clipboard_list_formats` reports which MIME types are currently on the clipboard, and `clipboard_read_raw` returns one of them verbatim
- `clipboard_version` reports the running package version, for hosts that do not surface it
- On Linux, `selection="primary"` reads the X11/Wayland PRIMARY selection — whatever you have highlighted — leaving your Ctrl-C buffer untouched
A Python package runner — pipx and uv are both documented — then register the `mcp-clipboard` console script. Published on PyPI as mcp-clipboard version 2.6.1, stdio transport. macOS and Windows need nothing else; Linux needs one clipboard utility, `wl-clipboard` on Wayland (`sudo apt install wl-clipboard` or `sudo dnf install wl-clipboard`). No account and no network — it talks to the local clipboard only.
One command — pipx install mcp-clipboard