You often see sites with text fields of share links in various different formats, like Skitch provides links to share the images you skitch, they look like this:

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

You often click the text box or a copy button next to it and the content is copied to your clipboard so you can paste it into a tweet, a blog or forum post and what not.

I needed something like this for one of my projects, it is pretty easy to do, and there are things you can use to do this. However there isn’t a super simple way to do this in Rails, maybe it’s so simple that nobody bothered to publish a plugin. Well, just for kicks I’ve created a plugin that lets you do exactly this by using a cilick_to_copy_text_field_tag helper in your views. This plugin requires jQuery or jRails, neither of which is part of standard Rails, but they are pretty easy to add to any Rails project.

The plugin is hosted here: http://github.com/ayn/click_to_copy_text_field/tree/master, the README pretty much tells all you need to know to use it.