@jond oh wow here's some magic that fixes my issue (which is that I am doing my dev via ssh on another machine)
https://stackoverflow.com/a/6629316/4869657
Instead of piping to `xclip` I can pipe to `ssh myLocalMachine pbcopy`, like:
glogbranch | ssh myLocalMachine pbcopy
This works since my local machine is a mac that uses pbcopy to do clipboard stuff. Amazing.