Toms Clippy Light

A lightweight, native clipboard history app for macOS 26 Tahoe. Lives in the menubar, stores the last N items you copied (text, images, files), and lets you paste any of them back with a global shortcut.

🇩🇪 Deutsche Version

Features

• Menubar-only app — no Dock icon, stays out of your way
• Unified clipboard history: plain text, rich text (RTF), images, and file references
• Global shortcut (default: ⇧⌘V) to open the history popover from any app
• Auto-paste into the previously focused text field
• Search, pin favorites, deduplicate — clipboard history done right
• Password-aware: respects NSPasteboardTypeConcealed, so 1Password / Safari AutoFill entries don't leak into history
• Bilingual UI: English + German, auto-detects from system, overridable in settings
• Launch at login toggle (SMAppService)
• Optional persistence across restarts (JSON in ~/Library/Application Support/TomsClippyLight/)

Screenshots

Screenshots to be added after first build.

Installation

Since this app is unsigned (no Apple Developer ID), macOS will quarantine it by default. You need to remove the quarantine flag manually.

Step-by-step

1. Download the latest TomsClippyLight.zip from the Releases page.

2. Unzip and move TomsClippyLight.app to /Applications.

3. Open Terminal and run:

   xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /Applications/TomsClippyLight.app

   Alternatively, use the bundled helper:

   curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tomschmidtdev/toms-clippy-light/main/scripts/install.sh | bash

4. Launch the app.

5. On your first paste via the history, macOS will ask for Accessibility permission. Grant it under System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility.

Configuration

Right-click the menubar icon, choose Settings….

Option	Default	Description
Launch at login	off	Auto-start with your Mac via SMAppService
Language	Automatic	Override UI language (English / German)
History size	20	Max number of recent entries (1–100)
Persist history	off	Keep history across app restarts
Ignore passwords	on	Skip entries flagged by password managers
Show history shortcut	⇧⌘V	Open history popover globally

Keyboard shortcut

Press your configured shortcut (default ⇧⌘V) in any application. The history popover appears with a search field. Click an entry (or press Enter on the first match) to paste it back into the text field you just had focused.

Build from source

Requirements: macOS 26 Tahoe, Xcode 26+, XcodeGen.

brew install xcodegen
git clone https://github.com/tomschmidtdev/toms-clippy-light.git
cd toms-clippy-light
make build        # or: xcodegen generate && open TomsClippyLight.xcodeproj

Make targets

Target	Purpose
make generate	Regenerate .xcodeproj from project.yml
make build	Debug build
make test	Run unit + UI tests
make archive	Release archive (signed with Apple Development cert if available, otherwise ad-hoc)
make install	archive + copy .app to /Applications
make zip	Distributable .zip under build/
make release-local	Same as zip, prints artifact path
make clean	Remove build/, DerivedData/, generated .xcodeproj

Testing

The project uses Swift Testing for unit tests and XCUITest for UI smoke tests. Core services use dependency-injected protocol wrappers (PasteboardProtocol, WorkspaceProtocol, KeyboardSimulating, LaunchAtLoginService) so every system API is replaceable with a fake.

make test

Releasing

Push a tag of the form vX.Y.Z:

git tag v0.1.0
git push origin v0.1.0

GitHub Actions will:

1. Archive an unsigned TomsClippyLight.app
2. Package it into TomsClippyLight.zip
3. Compute its SHA-256
4. Create a GitHub Release with both artifacts and installation instructions

Permissions

Permission	Why
Accessibility	Needed to simulate ⌘V against the previously focused app after you pick an entry. macOS will prompt the first time you try to auto-paste.

The app does not request network access, full disk access, or any other elevated permissions.

Privacy

• Clipboard contents stay local to your Mac.
• With Persist history disabled (default), nothing touches disk.
• With it enabled, history is stored unencrypted in ~/Library/Application Support/TomsClippyLight/history.json.
• Password manager entries (flagged with NSPasteboardTypeConcealed) are ignored by default.

License

MIT © 2026 Tom Schmidt