Clipboard typing: type the clipboard as keystrokes

What clipboard typing is, and why it works where paste fails

Paste and typing reach a window through two different channels. A paste is a clipboard operation: something has to carry your clipboard to the target, and the target has to accept it. Typing is a stream of input events, one key at a time.

Plenty of windows have the second channel and not the first. A VNC-style VM console carries keyboard and mouse input and nothing else. An RDP or Citrix session has a clipboard only if redirection was left on. A login screen or installer has none, and a kiosk app or web form can swallow the paste event on purpose. The keyboard still works in all of them, so text sent as keystrokes arrives.

Microsoft described the mechanism plainly when it introduced Type clipboard text in Hyper-V: the console will "take any text that is currently in the physical computers clipboard and pretend to type it on the keyboard of the virtual machine". That is clipboard typing. For the browser side - the seven ways a web form blocks paste - see why paste does not work.

Check the console's own send-text feature first

• Hyper-V (VMConnect). The Clipboard menu has Type clipboard text. It is text only, and with a lot of text "you might have to wait for a while for it to catch up". The 2008 post says it works for any guest; Microsoft's current VMConnect documentation is narrower: "Enhanced session mode and Type clipboard text are available only for virtual machines that run recent Windows operating systems". Test on a Linux guest before relying on it.
• VMware Remote Console and Workstation. Broadcom's knowledge base article on VMRC copy and paste says "For Workstation the method is a 'Type Text' feature, so the password is virtually typed into the guestOS. For VMRC the method is 'Send clipboard as typed text'". The same article gives the per-VM isolation.tools settings that turn on an ordinary clipboard when you control the VM.

Other consoles are covered one by one in how to paste into a VM console with no clipboard. Where a corporate policy turned the clipboard off, see the Citrix and VMware Horizon guides and ask the administrator first.

The free ways to type the clipboard

All of these run on your machine and type into whichever window has focus. Nothing is installed on the remote side.

Windows: an AutoHotkey one-liner

AutoHotkey is free and open source (GPLv2). In v2, save this as a .ahk file and run it:

#Requires AutoHotkey v2.0
^+v::SendText A_Clipboard

Ctrl+Shift+V now types the clipboard. A_Clipboard is "a built-in variable that reflects the current contents of the Windows clipboard if those contents can be expressed as text", and SendText sends every character "literally", so a ! or ^ in a password is typed instead of being read as Alt or Ctrl. In Text mode a line break of any kind becomes a single Enter.

The catch is speed. The AutoHotkey docs are explicit that "SetKeyDelay is not obeyed when using SendInput mode (which is the default); there is no delay between keystrokes in that mode". A laggy remote console can drop characters. The paced version switches to SendEvent:

#Requires AutoHotkey v2.0
^+v:: {
    SetKeyDelay 30
    SendEvent "{Text}" A_Clipboard
}

That waits 30 ms after each keystroke; raise it until the far end keeps up. The widely shared "simulate typing the clipboard contents" gist carries the older AutoHotkey v1 form of the same idea, Send {Raw}%Clipboard%; the lines above are the v2 syntax. More on copypaster vs AutoHotkey.

Linux: xdotool on X11, wtype on Wayland

sleep 3; xdotool type --clearmodifiers --delay 25 "$(xclip -selection clipboard -o)"

The sleep gives you three seconds to click into the target. xdotool type "types as if you had typed it" with a default delay of 12 ms between keystrokes; 25 is kinder to a remote session. xclip reads the PRIMARY selection unless told otherwise, so -selection clipboard matters.

xdotool works through X11's XTEST extension, so it is an X11 tool. On Wayland, wtype ("xdotool type for wayland") reads standard input: wl-paste | wtype -d 25 -, with wl-paste from wl-clipboard.

macOS: osascript

osascript -e 'delay 3' -e 'tell application "System Events" to keystroke (the clipboard as text)'

This is the AppleScript line from the same gist, wrapped so it runs from Terminal with a three-second head start. It will fail until you grant permission: Apple's scripting guide says "By default, accessibility control of apps is disabled. For security and privacy reasons, the user must manually enable it on an app-by-app (including script apps) basis". On current macOS that is System Settings, Privacy & Security, Accessibility, and the app to allow is whatever runs the script, such as Terminal or Script Editor. The one-liner has no speed setting.

Small free tools

• TypeClipboard (Windows, MIT licence, also on the Microsoft Store). Its README: "For IT professionals everywhere who are sick of typing long complex passwords into remote consoles." Press F8 or click Type. Tested on vSphere, Horizon HTML5 and Citrix; the README warns that the vSphere web console does not work from Chrome or Edge.
• ClickPaste (Windows 10/11, BSD-3-Clause). A notification-area app that will "paste clipboard contents as keystrokes to whatever location you click", with settable delays, a hotkey and a confirmation prompt for large clipboards.
• TypeClipboard for macOS (a separate open-source project, macOS 13 or newer). It "replays your clipboard as live keyboard input so text works in VNC, RDP, Citrix, virtual consoles, and secure fields", with a per-character delay and Escape to cancel, and is candid that "some hardened prompts block all synthetic input".
• Microsoft Store apps. The Store lists Clipboard Typing and Clipboard Auto Type for the same job. We could not read publisher or rating details from the listings, so check them before installing anything that will handle passwords.

The limits they all share

• Keyboard layout mismatch. Many consoles forward key positions, not characters. With a US host and a French AZERTY guest, a arrives as q and the symbols scatter - a commenter under Microsoft's Hyper-V post shows a URL mangled exactly that way. xdotool's manual lists it under BUGS: "Typing unusual symbols under non-us keybindings is known to occasionally send the wrong character." Match the layouts on both ends, or test first.
• Non-ASCII characters. Accented letters, non-Latin scripts and emoji depend on how the tool injects them and whether the console forwards them at all. Plain ASCII is the safe case.
• Fixed speed. A script fires at one rate. Too fast and a slow link drops or reorders characters; Microsoft's forum archive has a known-issue post about Type Clipboard Text arriving "out of order or garbled" in one Windows Server beta. Slow it down until the output is clean.
• Long text. One-liners have no pause, no stop and no progress, and in the same thread a Microsoft engineer notes that released Hyper-V versions reject an oversized clipboard with an error telling you to send less text. For a long config file, SSH or a serial console is the better tool.
• Focus. Keystrokes go to whichever window is in front. Click away mid-run and the rest of a secret lands somewhere else.

Security note: the password is still on your clipboard

Typing a password from the clipboard does not remove it from the clipboard. It stays there for the next accidental Ctrl+V into a chat window. On Windows with clipboard history on, it also sits in the Win+V list, which Microsoft says holds up to 25 entries until you restart. Clear it when you are done: Settings, System, Clipboard, Clear clipboard data, or Win+V and Clear all. In AutoHotkey, add A_Clipboard := "" after the send.

Auto paste tool

People searching for an "auto paste tool" or "auto copy paste" usually mean something else: a clipboard manager, a phone keyboard with saved snippets, or a paste transformer such as PowerToys Advanced Paste. Those tools still paste, so they stop at the same windows Ctrl+V stops at. Clipboard typing is for the case where paste itself is refused.

Where copypaster fits

copypaster is a desktop app that does clipboard typing on Windows and Mac. You paste your text into its pill, click into the target window, press play, and after a 3-2-1 countdown it types the text as real operating-system keystrokes into whatever has focus. It changes how text enters a field - keystrokes instead of a paste event - and nothing about the text itself.

What it adds over the one-liners: a speed you set from 20 to 250 WPM, human timing with uneven gaps between keys, pause and stop with a progress bar, and the same behavior on both platforms without a script. What it does not add is an exemption from the limits above: it types into the focused window only, a layout mismatch can still swap characters, on Mac it needs the same Accessibility permission, and emoji still travel by clipboard, so they will not arrive where paste is blocked.

The free trial is 5 pastes, no card. After that it is paid (pricing). The one-liners are fine for a one-off. copypaster is for when you type into remote windows every week, on both operating systems, or into sessions laggy enough that pace, pause and stop matter, and you would rather press play than maintain a script. The wider category is on the auto typer page.