This question has been asked a couple of times also on AskUbuntu so I thought it is worth a blog post to elaborate on why in certain circumstances Diodon doesn’t save anything to the clipboard history and what you can do about it.

Since version 1.1.0 the way how Diodon stores its clipboard storage has changed – it used to be that the history was simply stored in the storage.xml file located in ~/.local/share/diodon/. This was fairly simple but had the limitation that the clipboard history was limited to a certain number of entries. If we wanted to increase this number but still using the single xml file Diodon would consume way too much memory and would have become too slow as well. To overcome this limitation have we moved away from this xml file and integrated a library called Zeitgeist.

Quick quote what Zeitgeist actually is:

Zeitgeist is a service which logs the users’ activities and events, anywhere from files opened to websites visited and conversations had.

As Diodon pretty much records users’ copy events is using Zeitgeist service a really good match. Besides recording Zeitgeist also provides a simple way to search certain activities and managing history which gives Diodon beside an infinitive clipboard history many more opportunities read more about it here.

But let’s get back to our initial question on why Diodon does not save anything to the clipboard history. For this we have to know that Zeitgeist has a privacy feature so it is possible to disable recording of any users’ events. This option is to be found in your “System Settings” -> “Security & Privacy” -> “Files & Applications” where it says “Record file and application usage”. When you turn this option off no users’ events will be recorded including copy events by Diodon. This means you can still access previous copy events recorded before disabling this option but no new items will be added. You properly ask yourself now how you can simply allow Diodon to save copy events but disable other applications from recording anything?

This is possible but at this stage not as apparent as it could be. In the same Security & Privacy dialog from above there is the possibility to enable recording but only including certain activities. Unfortunately is there no entry to simply include Clipboard. This is something we would really like to see in the future and are working on it – you can follow progress in this bug report. For now as a workaround to still allow Diodon to save copy events is to at least allow activity “Documents” to be recorded.

This could look like the following:

When this option is set you should be good to go and Diodon should start adding clipboard items to the history again.

I am glad to announce that another Diodon version has been released today with mainly changes underneath the surface such as improving API for plugin developers but also fixing some annoying bugs.

Here in detail what has changed:

• Fixed issue which could cause Diodon not starting when upgrading to a newer version (#1347181)
• Fixed issue that under certain desktop environments Diodon was not always added as startup application (#1348989)
• Improved plugin API (#1323947, #1309893, #1324309)
• Cleaning up dependencies for easier integration into other distributions (#1348994, #1310360)
• Updated translations

You can either download the new Diodon as a tarball or if you use Ubuntu or an Ubuntu based distribution use the stable ppa by running following commands:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:diodon-team/stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install diodon
# and for all Unity users there is also a scope
sudo apt-get install unity-scope-diodon


Thanks to everyone involved who made this release happen providing translations, reporting bugs, working on packaging, contributing source code or just simply using and advocating Diodon. Hope to see many more releases ahead.

You might have been using Diodon for a while and are wondering why there is no monochrome icon in your panel but instead a colored fish?

This could look like the following:

The icon does look a bit out of place in this specific theme. Unfortunately it is impossible to create an icon which suits every theme very well and if we would use a monochrome icon as the default it might not even show up on certain themes. That’s why we have decided to have a colored fish as the default panel icon as it is at least visible on all themes. For some commonly used themes we made some exceptions to use the monochrome icons directly.

However, in case you use a completely different theme and you would still like to have a Diodon monochrome icon there is a fairly quick way to do it.

You can use following command if you have a dark theme:
sudo ln -sf /usr/share/icons/ubuntu-mono-dark/status/22/diodon-panel.svg /usr/share/icons/[MYTHEME]/status/22/diodon-panel.svg


or this command with a light theme:
sudo ln -sf /usr/share/icons/ubuntu-mono-light/status/22/diodon-panel.svg /usr/share/icons/[MYTHEME]/status/22/diodon-panel.svg


In both cases replace [MYTHEME] with whatever theme you are using.

And last you need to update the cache of your theme with the following:
sudo gtk-update-icon-cache /usr/share/icons/[MYTHEME]/


Done. When you now close Diodon and open it up again a monochrome should be shown in your panel.

What I would recommend you though if you want to have a more permanent solution: Get in touch with your theme author and ask whether he would be willing to ship a monochrome icon for Diodon. In the end does the author know best what suits its theme and when the Diodon icons are shipped with the theme itself all users will benefit.

Diodon version 1.1.0 is shaping up very nicely and is hopefully soon going to be released after some last polishing.

Before this is gonna happen I want to introduce you to two new default settings which further make Diodon a slick and fast utility with as less footprint as possibly but still keeping options available for more advanced users. But let me elaborate.

Disabling of primary selection support by default

Primary selection support has been added to Diodon since its very first version. What this features does is when a certain text is selected in any editor it will automatically be added to the clipboard history and then it is accessible from the Diodon indicator or unity scope to paste at any time. This is cool especially when you frequently just select and paste with a middle mouse click in a different editor. As a primary selection can also be pasted with the shortcut <Shift>Insert when such support is enabled, Diodon is able to instant paste in applications which do not support <Ctrl>V for paste (e.g. Gnome Terminal).

However this feature also brings some disadvantages with it. First of all it floods the clipboard history with quite some items and especially if you do not use the select/paste feature at all. This distracts you from finding the items you actually want to paste. Furthermore does enabling of this feature potentially drains your battery quicker in case you are not connected directly to a power source.

Advantages and disadvantages indicate that primary selection support is an advanced feature. We therefore have decided to disable it by default but of course you are still able to enable it again in the Diodon preferences.

Not adding images to clipboard history by default

In versions before 1.1.0 Diodon added images to the clipboard history at all times. Those images can for instance be copied by your browser to the clipboard when you right click on an image and choose “Copy image”. Or also when you create a print screen and choose “Copy to clipboard”.

Nice but why do you want to disable this you might ask? Well unfortunately images are in general much bigger than just some text. This has an impact on the memory consumption of Diodon. So Diodon needs to copy the image to the memory and then create previews for it so you can easily identify it when you paste it. There are also some circumstances where image applications like Gimp constantly copy images to the clipboard which gives Diodon a lot of work to do increasing therefore CPU usage – and actually in most cases the many pictures copied by Gimp you do not really want to add to your clipboard history.

As this feature is not so often used and there is a possibility to decrease the memory footprint of Diodon, it is now disabled by default so images won’t be added to the clipboard history automatically. There is though an option available in Diodon preferences where you can enable it again.

No worries though. Disabling “Add images to clipboard history” won’t delete any image items from the history which have been copied previously. Such will always be available to be pasted for you till you decide to clear them from your history. That also means that you can temporarily enable/disable the feature whenever you need to without loosing any items copied already.

Want to test run it?

Convinced and want to test run it? You can do this with the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:diodon-team/daily
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install diodon unity-scope-diodon

Remember though that this is still a test version which might have issues. If you find any please report them. And also let us know what you think about this change in the comments section below.