Pano pitches itself as a ‘next-gen clipboard manager for GNOME Shell’ and based on first impressions I can confirm it definitely lives up to that claim!
The majority of Linux clipboard managers I’ve used over the years are text-based lists. You copy something to your clipboard and it’s added to a list. You then have to squint at truncated strings in a narrow vertical strip to work out which previously copied item is which.
Pano is not like that.
Rather than a vertical list of text Pano shows a graphical overview of your clipboard history. This visual approach makes it much faster to find previously copied content, be it a paragraph of text, an image, a website URL, code, emoji…
After you install Pano — I cover the ‘how to’ in a second — you can call up your clipboard history at any time, from any app, by pressing shift + super + v on your keyboard.
Upon pressing that magic combo your clipboard history slides in from the bottom of the screen (by default; you can change this location in the extension’s settings), with history presented in a single, scrollable row:
Horizontal presentation aside, what also sets Pano apart from its peers is its use of rich content previews. Images copied to your clipboard show you the actual image, web links render a thumbnail with webpage title, hex code values display the actual colour, and so on.
Click on any item in this row to copy it back to your clipboard so you can paste it elsewhere/again.
Visually scanning your clipboard history makes finding the exact link, meme, or text snippet you need much quicker than in a traditional text-based clipboard manager — but there is another speed boost: you can search your clipboard history too!
Of course, clipboard managers for Linux or any other OS are only as useful as their contents, and you won’t want everything you copy to be stored for future use. Pano allows you to remove items from your clipboard history by clicking on the ‘x’ in the corner — easy!
Settings are provided so you can specify a database history location, set the number of items Pano will remember, adjust the keyboard shortcut you press to open, adjust its position on screen, and lots more — install it, then dive in to customise.
Installing Pano in Ubuntu
Want to try Pano out firsthand?
Pano is free, open source software and is available to install from GNOME Extensions using any compatible web browser.
But I recommend install the awesome desktop Extension Manager app and installing it through that as it doesn’t require adding extra browser extensions.
Pano works with GNOME 42 and above (so you need to be using Ubuntu 22.04 LTS or later) but it does require you to install some additional dependencies in order for it to work: the libgda and gsound packages.
In Ubuntu you need to install the gir1.2-gda-5.0 and gir1.2-gsound-1.0 packages using a Terminal (or a GUI tool like Synaptic). You then need to log out and back in in order for everything to work hunky-dory, super-sweet, off-the-bat.
Source code is on GitHub, which is the best place to file any issues you have or propose any changes you think would improve this utility. Developers may be interested to know Pano is written in Typescript and compiled to JavaScript using Rollup.
What do you think of it? Let me know in the comments below!