clipsy 1.9.1

Lightweight clipboard history manager for macOS

Clipsy

A lightweight clipboard history manager for macOS. Runs as a menu bar icon — no admin privileges, no code signing, no App Store required.

Features

• Clipboard history — Automatically captures text, images, and file copies
• Image thumbnails — Visual previews for copied images in the menu
• Sensitive data masking — Auto-detects API keys, passwords, SSNs, credit cards, private keys, and tokens; displays masked previews with 🔒 icon
• Search — Full-text search across all clipboard entries (SQLite FTS5)
• Rich text preservation — Preserves RTF and HTML formatting when re-copying from history (e.g., bold, italic, links from web pages)
• Pin favorites — Option-click to pin up to 5 frequently-used snippets (sensitive data cannot be pinned)
• Click to re-copy — Click any entry in the menu to put it back on your clipboard
• Deduplication — Copying the same content twice bumps it to the top instead of creating a duplicate
• Auto-purge — Keeps the most recent 500 entries, automatically cleans up old ones
• Persistent storage — History survives app restarts (SQLite database)
• Corporate IT friendly — Runs as a plain Python process, no .app bundle or Gatekeeper issues

Requirements

• macOS
• Python 3.10+ (Homebrew recommended: brew install python3)

Installation

Via Homebrew (recommended)

brew install brencon/clipsy/clipsy
clipsy

Via pipx

brew install pipx
pipx install clipsy
clipsy

Via pip

pip install clipsy
clipsy

From source

git clone https://github.com/brencon/clipsy.git
cd clipsy
python3 -m venv .venv
.venv/bin/pip install -e .
.venv/bin/clipsy

Usage

After running clipsy, the app installs as a background service and starts automatically on login. A scissors icon (✂️) appears in your menu bar.

Then just use your Mac normally. Every time you copy something, it shows up in the Clipsy menu:

[✂️ Icon]
├── Clipsy - Clipboard History
├── ──────────────────
├── Search...
├── ──────────────────
├── 📌 Pinned ►
│   ├── "my-api-endpoint.com/v1..."
│   ├── "SELECT * FROM users..."
│   ├── ──────────────────
│   └── Clear Pinned
├── ──────────────────
├── "Meeting notes for Q3 plan..."
├── "https://github.com/example..."
├── 🔒 "password=••••••••"
├── [thumbnail] "[Image: 1920x1080]"
├── ... (up to 10 items, configurable)
├── ──────────────────
├── Clear History
├── ──────────────────
├── Support Clipsy
├── ──────────────────
└── Quit Clipsy

Tip: Hold Option (⌥) while clicking an entry to pin/unpin it.

Commands

clipsy            # Install and start as background service (default)
clipsy status     # Check if running
clipsy uninstall  # Remove from login items
clipsy run        # Run in foreground (for debugging)

Configuration

Variable	Default	Range	Description
CLIPSY_MENU_DISPLAY_COUNT	10	5–50	Number of entries shown in the menu

# Example: show 20 entries in the menu
export CLIPSY_MENU_DISPLAY_COUNT=20

Data Storage

All data is stored in ~/.local/share/clipsy/:

File	Purpose
clipsy.db	SQLite database with clipboard entries
images/	Saved clipboard images (PNG files)
clipsy.log	Application log

Development

# Install with dev dependencies
.venv/bin/pip install -e ".[dev]"

# Run tests
.venv/bin/python -m pytest tests/ -v

# Run with coverage
.venv/bin/python -m pytest tests/ --cov=clipsy --cov-report=term-missing

Architecture

NSPasteboard → monitor.py → redact.py → storage.py (SQLite) → app.py (menu bar UI)

• app.py — rumps.App subclass; renders the menu bar dropdown, handles clicks and search
• monitor.py — Polls NSPasteboard.changeCount() every 0.5s; detects text, images, and file copies
• storage.py — SQLite with FTS5 full-text search, SHA-256 deduplication, auto-purge
• redact.py — Sensitive data detection and masking (API keys, passwords, SSN, credit cards, tokens)
• config.py — Constants, paths, limits
• models.py — ClipboardEntry dataclass, ContentType enum
• utils.py — Hashing, text truncation, PNG dimension parsing, thumbnail generation

Dependencies

Only one external dependency:

• rumps — macOS menu bar app framework (brings pyobjc-framework-Cocoa transitively)
• sqlite3 — Built into Python

License

MIT License — see LICENSE for details.