Clink

Have you ever pasted a link in messenger and deleted all those fbclid, utm_source, and so on, GET params by hands? Clink does that for you.

It sits quietly in the background, and if you copy a link to the clipboard, Clink automatically removes those params for you.

Install

cargo install --git https://github.com/Lurk/clink clink

Run

clink

Running clink with no subcommand starts the clipboard monitor daemon.

Commands

Command	Description
clink	Start the clipboard monitor (default)
clink run	Same as above, explicit form
clink init	Initialize default config file
clink install	Install as a system service (launchd/systemd)
clink uninstall	Remove the installed system service
clink validate	Validate configuration file
clink reload	Reload configuration of the running instance
clink restart	Restart the running instance
clink state	Show current state and last log entries
clink update	Fetch and cache remote patterns

Global options

All commands accept these options:

• -c, --config <path> — Specify config file path
• -v, --verbose — Enable verbose output

Service management

Install clink to start automatically on login:

clink install

This creates a launchd agent on macOS or a systemd user service on Linux. To remove:

clink uninstall

Runtime management

clink state     # Check if clink is running and view recent log
clink reload    # Reload config without restarting
clink restart   # Stop the running instance
clink update    # Fetch and cache remote patterns

Config

Path for config file can be altered by -c, --config option.

Default path:

• Mac: /Users/Alice/Library/Application Support/clink/config.toml
• Lin: /home/alice/.config/clink/config.toml
• Win: C:\Users\Alice\AppData\Roaming\clink\config.toml
• fallback: current directory/config.toml

On the first run, clink will create the default config in the path.

If you have an old config with flat params and exit arrays, clink will auto-migrate it to the provider-based format on first run. A backup of the old config is saved as config.toml.backup.

Tracking rules ship built in (sourced from ClearURLs under LGPL-3.0) and are embedded in the binary. Your config.toml only needs to hold runtime settings and any custom providers you want to add on top.

Default config:

# Clink configuration
# https://github.com/Lurk/clink

# Processing mode for tracking parameters:
#   remove   — strip tracking params from URLs
#   replace  — replace param values with `replace_to` text
#   your_mom — remove params + add utm_source=your_mom (except Mother's Day)
#   evil     — randomly swap characters in tracking param values
mode = 'remove'

# Replacement text used in 'replace' mode
replace_to = 'clink'

# How often clink checks the clipboard, in milliseconds
sleep_duration = 150

# Built-in tracking rules ship with clink (sourced from ClearURLs, LGPL-3.0)
# and are embedded in the binary. Run `clink update` to fetch the latest.
#
# The providers below ship as defaults — they cover redirectors and rules
# that the ClearURLs snapshot doesn't. Edit, remove, or add your own.

[providers.exitsc]
url_pattern = '^https?://exit\.sc'
redirections = ['^https?://exit\.sc/\?.*?url=([^&]+)']

# ...plus google, facebook, instagram, bing, youtube, linkedin, mora, amazon

# Fetch providers from a remote URL. Must be https — `clink update` rejects
# plaintext http and other schemes so a network attacker can't swap the rule
# set or have the daemon read arbitrary local files via file:// URLs.
# Supported formats:
#   clearurls — ClearURLs data.min.json (https://docs.clearurls.xyz/1.26.1/specs/rules/)
#   clink     — native clink TOML format
[remote]
url = 'https://rules2.clearurls.xyz/data.min.json'
format = 'clearurls'

mode

Those are the modes available:

• remove - removes params from links in clipboard
• replace - replaces values of params to value from 'replace_to' config param. For example, default value is base64 of a link ;)
• your_mom - acts as remove mode and adds utm_source=your_mom, unless it is a Mother's day.(inspired by this tweet)
• evil - swap two random chars in values (Diabolical Laughter)

replace_to

This is the value that will be used in replace mode

sleep_duration

Sleep duration between clipboard data pulls in milliseconds.

providers

The config is organized around providers. Each provider groups rules and redirections that apply to a specific domain (or globally). A provider can have:

• url_pattern — a regex that the URL must match for this provider to apply. Omit it (as in providers.global) to match all URLs.
• rules — an array of param names to strip from matching URLs.
• redirections — an array of regexes used to unwrap redirect/exit URLs (see below).
• exceptions — an array of regexes that exclude URLs from the provider. If a URL matches any exception, neither rules nor redirections fire for it.

Matching follows ClearURLs semantics: every regex is matched case-insensitively, and entries in rules are anchored to the full parameter name (i.e. (?:ref_?)?src matches src, refsrc, ref_src — not srcset). url_pattern, redirections, and exceptions are not anchored.

The providers.global provider has no url_pattern, so its rules apply to every URL. Domain-specific providers like providers.youtube or providers.amazon only fire when the URL matches their url_pattern.

The template generated by clink init ships a handful of clink-curated providers (exit.sc, mora.jp, the explicit Amazon rules, etc.) that the ClearURLs snapshot doesn't cover. The bulk of common tracking rules — fbclid, gclid, utm_*, and so on — comes from the embedded ClearURLs snapshot. Anything you add to [providers.*] in your config.toml is merged on top of the built-ins. Running clink update replaces the built-ins with a fresher snapshot cached locally; the providers in your config.toml always apply regardless.

redirections

Redirections unwrap exit/redirect URLs. Each entry is a regex with one capture group that extracts the destination URL.

For example this URL: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjMuu2zrreBAxUt2gIHHaDVC_gQyCl6BAgqEAM&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DdQw4w9WgXcQ&usg=AOvVaw0aHtehaphMhOCAkCydRLZU&opi=89978449,

Will be unwrapped to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

How does it work? The Google provider's redirection regex matches the URL and captures the url (or q) query param value:

[providers.google]
url_pattern = '^https?://([a-z0-9-]+\.)*?google\.[a-z]{2,}'
redirections = ['^https?://[a-z0-9.-]*google\.[a-z.]+/url\?.*?(?:url|q)=([^&]+)']

The url_pattern ensures this redirection only fires on Google domains. The regex in redirections captures everything after url= or q= (up to the next &) as the destination URL.

This feature is heavily inspired by musicbrainz-bot

remote

Fetch providers from a remote URL. Remote providers serve as a base; your local providers are merged on top.

By default, clink uses ClearURLs as the remote source:

[remote]
url = 'https://rules2.clearurls.xyz/data.min.json'
format = 'clearurls'

Supported formats:

• clearurls — ClearURLs data.min.json (LGPLv3, maintained by Kevin R. / AMinber). ClearURLs rules map 1:1 to providers — domain scoping, regex rules, and redirections all come through.
• clink — clink-native TOML with providers

To fetch the remote patterns, run:

clink update

This fetches the remote patterns and caches them locally. Run clink update again whenever you want to pull the latest version. Then clink reload to apply.

To disable remote patterns, remove the [remote] section from the config.

Lookalike-host caveat

ClearURLs ships host patterns shaped like ^https?://(?:[a-z0-9-]+\.)*?change\.org, which don't anchor the end of the host. A URL such as https://change.org.attacker.com/?source_location=x therefore matches the change.org provider, and clink will strip source_location before pasting.

This is a clipboard mangling, not a leak: nothing is sent anywhere, and the URL still resolves to attacker.com — just with one fewer query param. clink-curated providers in the default config (amazon, exit.sc, ...) anchor host end with (?:[/:?#]|$) and aren't affected; the issue is specific to the imported ClearURLs snapshot.

If you hit a case that bothers you, send a PR to ClearURLs/Rules tightening the offending urlPattern; running clink update will pick it up.

Build

Linux

Make sure that you have libxkbcommon-dev libxcb-shape0-dev libxcb-xfixes0-dev installed

sudo apt-get install libxkbcommon-dev libxcb-shape0-dev libxcb-xfixes0-dev

MacOs

Works right away

Windows

Should work but not tested, yet.

Credits

Clink's built-in tracking rules are derived from the ClearURLs project and are licensed under the LGPL-3.0. A translated snapshot of the ClearURLs ruleset is bundled at src/builtin_patterns.toml and embedded in every clink binary. Run clink update to fetch the latest ClearURLs rules into a user-local cache.

See the top-level NOTICE file for the full attribution.