Who keeps an eye on clipboard access?

That could work but still feels dodgy since if you can grant that permission to a clipboard manager, you can also grant it to something like a TikTok client or an Adobe DRM reader or whatever else program you want to use (ie. the reason you are using your computer in the first place) but also might want to snoop for your data.

IMO a better solution that wouldn't break existing clipboard usage is to have a second "secure" clipboard that you can lock as tight as you want with explicit permissions for reading it, notifications for writing to it and whatever else you want. Then password managers would copy data to that and text editors and browsers can have a "Copy Sensitive Data" (or something better worded) in addition to "Copy" that will place data there.

Sure some people will still use Copy but some people will also stick post-it notes with their passwords on their monitors and give thousands of dollars to Nigerian princes - you shouldn't to punish everyone for the ignorance of a few.

> For global keyboard shortcuts an app should make commands available and it should be up to the user to tell their OS which shortcuts they want to give an app. Not just for security, but also for customisability and to avoid conflicts

This only works if all applications are using the same framework and toolkit and target the same OS. Meanwhile notice how even when you limit yourself to applications targeting Windows alone there are tons of different frameworks - let alone cross platform applications that tend to use a lowest common denominator approach.

IMO if you want to get more secure functionality, you need to do it in a way that works alongside existing practice - hence containers and sandboxing for untrusted applications working alongside trusted applications that can do what they want. Unless you start everything from scratch on a brand new computing approach (like mobiles did and even then it barely works and despite people treating mobiles almost like consumables), trying to force a top-down approach to security is doomed to fail.

If we are going to break standard APIs then why not do away with the clipboard for secrets entirely and have a global secrets store that applications can pull credentials from directly and securely instead of passing secrets via a clear text protocol.

This is how Linux and macOS work (albeit I wish 3rd party stores could natively integrate with them). This is how cloud computing works too (eg AWS Secrets Manager). Using a clipboard for copying secrets is completely the wrong approach regardless of how much you over-engineer your clipboard manager.

I've always wanted a clipboard/paste manager - with history - like this, that would allow me to copy, manipulate, and paste or share that data to another application.

I don't know how this would look, but even the ability to pop open my paste manager and look at the copied contents, filter it, or split the text, or (silly stuff) convert text to emoji'fied content, or take a screenshot of that (text to bitmap), and create a new entry within the paste manager. For some of my friends it would be awesome to have a hex editor in there.

Perhaps there are 2 focuses: Isolating what is copied from applications until the user chooses to expose it, and the history function. Being able to send it to another app for manipulation and pulling it back is a 2nd responsibility. It would be /suave/ to have this all in the same GUI brought up by the compositor, though.