ClipboardCopy

The ClipboardCopy command writes the selected entities to your system clipboard as JSON text. Because it uses the real clipboard rather than an in-memory buffer, the copied geometry survives outside the drawing: paste it into a different file, a second browser tab, or a window you open later with ClipboardPaste.

This is the difference from Copy: Copy duplicates entities inside the current drawing in one gesture, while ClipboardCopy puts them somewhere they can be retrieved from a different drawing entirely.

Two ways to start

Pre-select, then copy — the fast path:

Select one or more entities on the canvas.
Press Ctrl+C (Cmd+C on macOS), or type ClipboardCopy in the terminal.
The entities are written to the clipboard immediately and the command exits.

Activate, then select — start with nothing selected:

Press Ctrl+C or type ClipboardCopy with an empty selection.
The prompt reads pick objects to copy — Enter or Space to confirm.
Select objects — click to toggle individual entities, or drag to select by area.
Press Enter or Space to copy the selection and exit.

Pressing Enter or Space while nothing is selected simply ends the command without touching the clipboard.

What gets copied

The clipboard payload carries more than raw geometry, so a paste into an unrelated drawing still looks right:

Part	Purpose
Entities	The full serialized form of every selected entity
Reference point	The lower-left corner of the selection’s combined bounds — what ClipboardPaste anchors to the cursor
Layers	Only the layers the copied entities actually reference, by name
Linetypes	Only the linetypes the copied entities actually reference, by name

Only referenced table entries travel with the copy — not the whole source drawing’s layer and linetype tables. Hatch patterns are not bundled at all and don’t need to be: a drawing’s pattern table is the built-in default set, and any .pat files you have uploaded live in a per-user store that is already shared across tabs, so a pasted hatch resolves its own pattern.

Confirmation

On success the terminal reports how many entities were written:

3 entities copied to clipboard

If the browser refuses clipboard access, the terminal shows Copy failed: clipboard access denied and nothing is written. This is a browser permission decision, not a drawing error — see Clipboard permissions below.

Selection during the command

Method	Behaviour
Click	Toggles the entity under the cursor in/out of the selection
Drag right (strict)	Adds entities fully inside the box
Drag left (crossing)	Adds entities that intersect the box boundary
Enter / Space	Confirms the selection and copies

Keyboard reference

Key	Action
`Ctrl+C` / `Cmd+C`	Activate ClipboardCopy
`Enter` / `Space`	Copy the current selection, or exit if nothing is selected
`Escape`	Cancel without copying

Clipboard permissions

Writing to the system clipboard requires browser permission. In practice a copy triggered by a keypress is granted without a prompt in current desktop browsers, but a page that has lost focus, or a browser with strict clipboard settings, can refuse. If you see the access-denied message, click once on the canvas to give the page focus and try again.

Because the payload is ordinary JSON text, anything else you copy afterwards — a line of text, a URL — replaces it. Copy again before pasting if you have used the clipboard for something else in between.

Supported entities

ClipboardCopy works on every entity type. Entities are serialized with the same mechanism the native .json export uses, so nothing is dropped on the way out.