Clipd

A lightweight, local-only clipboard history manager for macOS. Swift + SwiftUI, no third-party dependencies, MIT licensed.

Menu bar	Dock window

Features

• Keeps your last 30 copied text snippets (pinned items don't count against the cap)
• Click an item to copy it back to the clipboard
• Search, pin favorites, clear history (pinned items survive unless you say otherwise)
• Pause recording any time
• Midnight-black dark theme and beige light theme, or follow the system
• Lives in the menu bar and the Dock — or menu-bar-only via a toggle in settings

Your data stays on your Mac

• No networking code at all. No URLSession, no analytics, no update checks.
• No scary permissions. Clipd never asks for Accessibility, Full Disk Access, or Screen Recording. Clicking an item copies it — you paste yourself with ⌘V.
• Password managers are respected. Payloads marked with the standard nspasteboard.org concealed/transient/auto-generated types are never recorded. There's also a Pause toggle for manual credential handling.
• One small file. History lives in ~/Library/Application Support/Clipd/history.json with owner-only (0600) permissions, capped at 30 unpinned items. Delete the file and it's gone.
• Not encrypted at rest. FileVault is the real protection here. Note that ~/Library/Application Support/ is included in Time Machine and most cloud backups, so a copied secret can outlive the 30-item cap inside a backup.
• No third-party dependencies — no supply-chain surface.

Install (no building required)

Apple Silicon only. Clipd runs on M-series Macs (M1 and later) with macOS 14+. Intel Macs are not supported.

1. Download Clipd.app.zip from the latest GitHub Release and unzip it.

2. Drag Clipd.app into /Applications.

3. First launch only: macOS quarantines apps downloaded from the internet, and Clipd isn't notarized. Either right-click Clipd.app → Open → Open, or clear the quarantine flag in Terminal:

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

After that it opens normally. Prefer to see exactly what you're running? Build from source below — it's two commands.

Build from source

Requires macOS 14+ and either Xcode or just the Command Line Tools (xcode-select --install).

git clone https://github.com/net-folade/clipd.git
cd clipd
swift Scripts/make-icon.swift   # once — renders Assets/AppIcon.icns
Scripts/build-app.sh            # release build → Clipd.app (ad-hoc signed)
cp -R Clipd.app /Applications

Run the tests with Scripts/test.sh (a thin wrapper over swift test that adds the framework search paths a CLT-only toolchain needs for Swift Testing).

Gatekeeper note

Clipd is ad-hoc signed, not notarized (notarization requires a paid Apple Developer account and isn't needed for personal use). On first launch, right-click Clipd.app → Open → Open to get past Gatekeeper.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome — bug fixes, features, docs, tests, all of it.

• Found a bug? Open an issue with your macOS version and what you did.
• Have a fix or a feature? Send a pull request. For anything sizeable, an issue first is appreciated so we can agree on the shape before you write it, but it isn't required.
• Before you push: run Scripts/test.sh and add a test for new behavior. Every PR runs swift build and swift test in CI.

Two things stay non-negotiable: no third-party dependencies, and no networking code. Those are the point of the project. The "out of scope for v1" list below is about what I didn't build yet, not about what I'd refuse.

Out of scope for v1

Images/files, global hotkey, auto-paste, launch-at-login, sync, encryption at rest, configurable history size.

License

MIT © Folade