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The terminal: clipboard, opening files, file manager, notifications

There is no display, no Wayland and no D-Bus in the box. A few shims in /usr/local/bin make the usual desktop commands work through the terminal you are connected from.

Copying to the clipboard

The image ships /usr/local/bin/wl-copy and wl-paste. The copy function of the dotarchy config calls wl-copy, and there is no Wayland in the box, so the shim does two things instead. It puts the text in the tmux buffer, which you paste with prefix + ], and it relays it to the terminal with OSC 52. That also fills the clipboard of the machine you are connected from over SSH, as long as its terminal supports OSC 52. Alacritty, Ghostty, Kitty and foot do. Outside tmux the shim sends OSC 52 directly. wl-paste prints the tmux buffer back.

Opening a URL, a file or a directory

There is no browser either. /usr/local/bin/xdg-open is a shim, and BROWSER points to it system-wide, ahead of the dotarchy default. What it does depends on the argument:

  • a URL is copied into your clipboard through wl-copy, and one line says so. This is what gh auth login, the OAuth flows of the agents and the repo alias of the dotarchy config go through;
  • a directory opens in yazi, a file in $EDITOR (nvim), in a new tmux pane next to the current one: below it, or to its right when the pane is wide enough (more than three times wider than tall) to be split in two. Outside tmux it runs in the foreground. open . from the dotarchy aliases therefore gives you a file manager next to your shell;
  • an image (SVG aside, which is text and goes to the editor) is drawn by chafa in a floating tmux pane centered over the window, 90% of its size; any key closes it. Enter on a picture in yazi comes here too. A floating pane (tmux 3.7) rather than display-popup, which draws no image.

The open function discards the output of xdg-open, so its messages arrive as a terminal notification through notify-send instead (see below). EDITOR and VISUAL are set to nvim system-wide for the same reason: a pane opened by a command only carries the environment of the login shell, not the exports of the dotarchy config, and yazi would otherwise fall back on vi, which the image does not ship.

The file manager

yazi is the file manager, and the box gives it what it needs to be more than a directory listing:

  • images are drawn by your terminal. yazi asks the terminal what it can do (Kitty graphics, Sixel, iTerm2 inline images) and the answer travels through tmux and SSH, so a picture, a PDF page or an SVG shows up in the preview pane in Ghostty, Kitty, WezTerm or foot. It also sets allow-passthrough all on its own pane. For a terminal that draws nothing (Alacritty, a plain xterm), the image is rendered as text by chafa. The image ships chafa, 7zip (archives), resvg (SVG), imagemagick (HEIC, AVIF, fonts) and poppler (PDF). Video thumbnails need ffmpeg, left out of the image for its size: devbox dev-env media installs it and brings it back after every rebuild. yazi --debug lists what yazi found, and which protocol it settled on;
  • c c copies the path into your clipboard, c f the file name, c d the directory, as yazi does everywhere: it sends OSC 52 straight to the terminal, and calls wl-copy, which is the shim described above. Both roads end in the clipboard of the machine you are connected from, and in the tmux buffer;
  • c t sends the selected files to another machine, over Taildrop. The chord runs devbox tailscale send on the selection (or the hovered file), a menu asks which machine among the ones online, and the screen waits for enter before going back to yazi;
  • c s shares the current directory with the tailnet over Taildrive (devbox tailscale share), and g T goes to the shares of the tailnet, sftp://tailnet, one folder per machine (devbox tailscale open, see access.md). The first time, it asks before installing rclone, the bridge between Taildrive and yazi. A remote file is downloaded on its own to be previewed (up to 10 MB), Enter opens it like a local one. These chords come from ~/.config/yazi/keymap.toml, a file the image seeds and never overwrites once you changed it (see customization.md for how the seed works), so it is the place for your own bindings too. ~ in yazi lists them all.

Desktop notifications

The image also ships /usr/local/bin/notify-send. There is no D-Bus in the box, so the shim writes the notification to the terminal as OSC 777 instead, wrapped in a tmux passthrough sequence when it runs inside tmux. SSH carries it like any other output and the terminal you are connected from shows it as a desktop notification. foot, Kitty, Ghostty and WezTerm support OSC 777; Alacritty does not. The usual notify-send options are accepted and ignored, only the summary and the body are sent. Only the terminal attached to the tmux session receives it, a detached session notifies nobody, and a pane that is not visible needs allow-passthrough all in the tmux config rather than on.

notify-send "Build finished" "42 tests passed"