🐥 Copy to clipboard in IEx

Copying from the terminal is a common scenario for me. And macOS’ built-in pbcopy command makes it very easy to do:

cat some-file.txt | pbcopy

But there isn’t something similar in Elixir that let’s you copy large terms easily. I usually have to call inspect(term, limit: :infinity), manually select the printed output and then copy it.

Fortunately, the Port module in Elixir stdlib lets you work with external commands and pipe data to them.

I have a common Helpers module that I put in many of the .iex.exs files in my projects. These are automatically loaded whenever IEx starts. I have a copy/1 helper1 in them as well:

defmodule Helpers do
  def copy(term) do
    text =
      if is_binary(term) do
        term
      else
        inspect(term, limit: :infinity, pretty: true)
      end

    port = Port.open({:spawn, "pbcopy"}, [])
    true = Port.command(port, text)
    true = Port.close(port)

    :ok
  end
end

Using it is straight-forward:

iex(1)> User |> Repo.get!(user_id) |> Helpers.copy
:ok

1. The helper above is a simplified version of Khaja Minhajuddin’s post on the same topic which is focused on Linux instead.↩