When I first introduced Snippy on this blog, it was built primarily around my personal workflow: X11 and wlroots-based Wayland compositors (like Sway, Hyprland, and Niri) paired with rofi and fzf.

The Motivation: Shared Team Knowledge

I began maintaining a shared snippet repository at work to share knowledge and daily DBA, sysadmin, and security snippets. Most people maintained their own personal cheat sheets locally on their laptops, and I wanted to show how we could collaborate on them together.

While several colleagues were eager to adopt Snippy, we hit an immediate obstacle: the majority desktop environment at work is GNOME (running Wayland). Because Snippy relied on wlroots tools, they could not use it.

Solving this for the team became the primary motivation behind Snippy v1.3.0: bringing seamless compatibility to GNOME and KDE Plasma under Wayland.

The Wayland Input Problem

On X11, simulating keystrokes for automated snippet pasting and cursor placement ({cursor}) is straightforward with xdotool.

On Wayland, security isolation restricts arbitrary input injection. Snippy previously used wtype to simulate key presses, which relies on the zwp_virtual_keyboard_v1 protocol implemented by wlroots-based compositors. Neither GNOME (Mutter) nor KDE Plasma (KWin) implements this protocol in a way that allows wtype to work out of the box.

How v1.3.0 Solves It: dotool

To bring full Wayland compatibility to KDE Plasma and GNOME, Snippy v1.3.0 introduces support for dotool.

dotool simulates input at the kernel level via /dev/uinput. By detecting the active desktop session (KDE or GNOME), Snippy now routes keystrokes and cursor repositioning commands through dotool instead of wtype.

This delivers:

• Reliable text pasting across modern Wayland sessions.
• Full {cursor} placeholder positioning support in both desktop environments.
• Zero extra configuration required by the user, snippy automatically detects your desktop environment.

GNOME Support with wofi

Under GNOME Wayland, standard rofi often encounters display and grab limitations. In v1.3.0, Snippy automatically switches to wofi when running under GNOME.

On KDE Plasma, Sway, Hyprland, and X11, Snippy continues to use rofi as the default GUI launcher, with fzf always available for terminal-bound usage.

Nix support

The previous release also bring nix support, thanks for the work Aamod.

For manual installations or updates from source, check out the v1.3.0 release on GitHub.