I’m working on a clipboard manager, because I’m not happy with any of the ones currently available. Here are my design goals:

• The system should be able to efficiently store, manipulate, and search an unlimited number of clipboard entries with reasonable performance.

• The software should be cross-platform, and should have implementations for major desktop platforms (Windows, X11, Wayland, macOS).

• Non-text data (images) and rich text (e.g. HTML) should be supported.

• Clipboard history can be shared across instances using a network connection.

• Instances may temporarily go offline, and sync up with other instances once a connection is re-established.

• • All functionality should continue to be available when offline (other than sync).

• Deletions must be propagated across instances.

• Deleted clips must not be trivially recoverable.

• Deleted clips must be deleted everywhere, including any copies in OS clipboards.

• Sync should be incremental (and otherwise generally efficient).

• When connected, actions should propagate across instances in real time (instantly, as opposed to polling, and with no unnecessary roundtrips).

• Relaying should be supported (in a A B C scheme, A should be able to see C’s actions).

• Network topology cycles should not result in a feedback loop.

• It should be safe and easy to simply copy the database file to another host, “pre-seeding” the clipboard history.

• Support “portable installs” (carrying the software, configuration, and database on portable storage).

• It should be easy to write interoperable implementations of bridges/clients in most programming languages.

• Non-GUI functionality should be separated (or separatable) from GUI functionality, so that a GUI toolkit doesn’t need to be loaded at all times.

Any suggestions?