ClipVault

A lightweight, native macOS clipboard manager. Menu-bar only, built with Swift/AppKit/SwiftUI — no Electron, minimal memory footprint, and designed to hold an effectively unlimited clipboard history without the wheels coming off.

Features

• Menu-bar app — no dock icon, lives quietly in the status bar
• Global hotkey — ⌘⇧V from anywhere, no Accessibility permission required
• Massive history, small footprint — clipboard text is indexed in SQLite with full-text search (FTS5); images and files are stored as content-hashed blobs on disk, not in memory or the database, so history size doesn't degrade UI performance
• Instant search across your entire history, with type filters (Text / Images / Links / Files)
• Quick paste — press 1–9 while the popover is open to paste that row instantly
• Pin items to keep them forever, exempt from any cleanup
• Configurable retention — unlimited by item count by default, capped only by total disk usage (default 2 GB, adjustable); pinned items are never auto-removed
• Privacy-aware — automatically ignores copies from password managers (1Password, Bitwarden, etc.) via the org.nspasteboard.ConcealedType convention; per-app exclusion list in Preferences
• Dedupes consecutive identical copies
• Launch at login (optional, via SMAppService)

Requirements

• macOS 13 (Ventura) or later
• Xcode Command Line Tools (for swift/swiftc)

Building

Preferred:

swift build -c release

If your local toolchain's SwiftPM is broken (mismatched Command Line Tools install — a system issue unrelated to this code, shows up as a dyld: Symbol not found error from swift-package), use the bundled fallback build script, which invokes swiftc directly and assembles the .app bundle by hand:

./build.sh

Either way, the resulting app can be run directly or copied into /Applications:

open build/ClipVault.app
cp -R build/ClipVault.app /Applications/

The app is ad-hoc code-signed (codesign --sign -) for local use. It is not notarized, so if you move it to another Mac, Gatekeeper will block it on first launch — right-click → Open to bypass.

Usage

• Click the clipboard icon in the menu bar, or press ⌘⇧V, to open the history popover
• Type to search; use the filter chips to narrow by content type
• Double-click a row, or press its number key (1–9), to paste it
• Right-click a row for Copy / Pin / Delete
• Esc closes the popover
• Gear icon opens Preferences (launch at login, paste behavior, disk cap, excluded apps)

Architecture

• Core/ClipboardMonitor.swift — polls NSPasteboard.general.changeCount (macOS has no push notification for pasteboard changes); this is the standard, App-Store-safe technique every clipboard manager uses
• Core/Database.swift — thin wrapper over the system sqlite3 C library; schema includes an FTS5 virtual table kept in sync via triggers
• Core/BlobStore.swift — content-addressed storage for images/files under ~/Library/Application Support/ClipVault/Blobs, sharded by hash prefix
• Core/HistoryStore.swift — paginated view model backing the SwiftUI list, so the UI never has to hold the full history in memory
• Core/HotKeyManager.swift — Carbon RegisterEventHotKey-based global hotkey (no Accessibility permission needed)
• UI/ — SwiftUI views for the popover and preferences window

Data lives entirely locally in ~/Library/Application Support/ClipVault/ — nothing leaves your machine.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.