clipboard-manager

A lightweight macOS clipboard history manager — a leaner replacement for Jumpcut. It lives in the menu bar, watches the pasteboard for text, styled text and image clips, and binds one global hotkey to a searchable command-palette panel.

What it does

• ⌃⇧⌥⌘V (Hyper+V) — searchable panel. A blurred command-palette panel appears; type to filter, ↑/↓ to move, Return (or double-click) to paste the selected clip into the app you were in. Clicking anywhere outside it — or Esc — dismisses it. (Same as left-clicking the menu-bar icon.) The Hyper chord pairs with a Caps-Lock-as-Hyper remap such as the caps tool. The panel is themed Catppuccin — Latte in Light, Frappé in Dark, following the system appearance automatically.
• Captures text, styled text, and images. Bold/italic copied from a rich editor stays bold/italic in the list (recoloured to the theme so it's readable) and pastes back styled.
• Images don't sit in memory. The full image is written once to a disk cache ($TMPDIR/clipboard-manager-cache/<sha256>.png); only a thumbnail + size/dimensions are kept in memory. The cache is bounded by the 200-entry ring, a 256 MB total cap (oldest evicted first), and is wiped on launch and on quit. Text/RTF are never written to disk; history (last 200, de-duplicated) resets on logout/reboot.
• Password-safe — clips marked concealed/transient (password managers, other clipboard tools) are skipped.

Right-click the menu-bar icon for the clip count, Accessibility status, Clear History and Quit.

Requirements

• macOS 14+
• Xcode command line tools (xcode-select --install) — swiftc, iconutil, codesign.
• just — brew install just.

Install

Via the Homebrew tap:

brew tap nymann/tap
brew install --cask nymann/tap/clipboard-manager

Or from source:

just signing-setup  # one-time: create the stable signing identity
just install        # build clipboard-manager.app, copy it to /Applications
just agent-install  # auto-start at login via launchd

Accessibility permission

Auto-paste synthesizes ⌘V, which macOS gates behind Accessibility. On first launch you'll be prompted; grant it in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility. Until then the panel and hotkey still work — the selected clip is placed on the clipboard and you press ⌘V yourself (the app flashes a reminder).

The build is signed with a stable self-signed identity created by just signing-setup, so the Accessibility grant survives rebuilds — unlike ad-hoc signing, where every just build would void it. The identity is local to your machine; the committed .signing/openssl.cnf plus just signing-setup regenerate it, and the private key is gitignored.

The app is not notarized. After a cask install, clear the Gatekeeper quarantine once:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/clipboard-manager.app

All recipes

just signing-setup    One-time: create + import the stable signing identity
just build            Build clipboard-manager.app in the project directory
just reload           Rebuild and relaunch (Accessibility grant carries over)
just install          Build, then copy it to /Applications
just uninstall        Remove it from /Applications
just run              Run the binary directly (skips bundling)
just icon             Regenerate the reference AppIcon.iconset
just agent-install    Install the LaunchAgent so it starts at login
just agent-restart    Restart the LaunchAgent (use after rebuilding)
just agent-uninstall  Uninstall the LaunchAgent
just clean            Remove build artifacts
just release X.Y.Z    Tag, build, zip, publish a GitHub release

After editing the source, the dev loop is just just reload.

Notes

• The hotkey uses Carbon RegisterEventHotKey and needs no special permission; only auto-paste needs Accessibility.
• LSUIElement is set: menu-bar item only, no Dock icon.
• Hotkey and cap are hardcoded constants in clipboard-manager.swift (enum Cfg) for v0 — see design.md for rationale and possible later directions.

Release flow

just release X.Y.Z builds, zips, tags vX.Y.Z and publishes a GitHub release. The .github/workflows/bump-cask.yml workflow then opens a PR against nymann/homebrew-tap bumping the cask's version and sha256; merge it to ship.

The workflow needs a HOMEBREW_TAP_TOKEN repo secret (a fine-grained PAT with Contents + Pull requests write on nymann/homebrew-tap) — see the tap's README for the one-time setup.