OpenClip

A lightweight floating popup utility for macOS that turns any selected text into instant actions.

Features • Installation • Getting started • Extending • Building from source • Documentation • License

Select any text in any app, and OpenClip appears with contextual actions — copy, cut, paste, web search, definitions, your scripts, and extensions. A hotkey turns the popup into a fuzzy action-search palette that can reach any action in your catalog without leaving the popup.

Note

OpenClip reads selected text in real time through macOS Accessibility APIs — it never touches or pollutes your clipboard while monitoring, and it logs or stores nothing about your selections.

Features

• Instant contextual popup — select text anywhere and a floating bar appears with the actions that make sense for it. Actions with no live selection (like Copy/Cut) drop out automatically, and a selection-free popup falls back to the current clipboard contents.
• Action-search palette — press ⌥⌘C to turn the bar into a fuzzy search field over the entire action catalog, including disabled actions. Results are ranked by recency, then bar order, so your most-used actions float to the top.
• Zero-config builtins — Search, Copy, Cut, Paste, Services, and a Transform group (UPPERCASE, lowercase, Title Case, camelCase) work out of the box.
• Extensions — install .openclipext packages (JavaScript, AppleScript, shell, URL templates, key presses, Shortcuts, Services) from the built-in store, a file, or by dropping a folder into ~/.openclip/extensions. No compile step — a manifest plus a script is a complete extension.
• Custom actions from the GUI — add a web-search URL template or an inline shell script straight from Preferences, no manifest authoring required.
• Built-in AI assistant — run selected text through Apple Intelligence, a local Ollama model, or a cloud provider (OpenAI/Claude), or hand the query to your browser. AI presets appear as regular actions in the palette.
• AI presets as first-class actions — every AI provider/model is a reorderable, toggleable action with its own keyboard-friendly entry point, so the AI flows you use live in the same bar as everything else.
• Deep customization — drag to reorder the bar, disable actions, override titles and icons, and pick a Classic or Glass theme (Liquid Glass on macOS 26+, frosted material on 14–15) in System, Light, or Dark.
• App-specific rules — scope actions to apps with allow/deny rules, selection regexes, and required options that prompt the user when missing.
• Fast by design — Swift 6 with strict concurrency, a pure Core domain module, and a hover model that never re-evaluates the whole view per mouse move.

Installation

1. Download the latest release (.zip) from the releases page.

2. Drag OpenClip.app into your /Applications folder.

3. Launch OpenClip and grant Accessibility permission when prompted:

   System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility → enable OpenClip
   

Important

Accessibility permission is required: it's how OpenClip detects selections and reads the selected text without relying on the clipboard. You can grant or revoke it any time from Preferences.

First launch walks you through a 4-step onboarding — AI assistant (optional), extensions, and the popup theme — before text-selection monitoring starts.

Getting started

1. Select some text in any app. The popup bar appears next to your selection:

• Click an action to run it (copy, search, transform, run your extension…).
• Click a group or the AI bar to open a scoped palette of its sub-actions.
• Run an AI action to see its output in a native result card (Replace/Copy buttons; back chevron or Esc to exit).

2. Use the hotkeys:

Shortcut	Action
⌥⌘C	Toggle the popup (or the action-search palette if the bar is up)
Esc	Dismiss the popup / drop back from a scoped palette
Cmd ⌘,	Open Preferences while the popup is focused

3. Search everything. With the bar up, press ⌥⌘C (or start typing) to filter the full action catalog — including disabled actions — by title. Type a fragment of any action name to jump straight to it.

Tip

No text selected? The popup still appears and acts on the current clipboard contents — Copy/Cut just drop out because there's no live selection to copy from.

Extending OpenClip

OpenClip is designed to be extended without touching Swift. Anything in ~/.openclip/extensions/ is scanned at launch and turned into actions:

~/.openclip/extensions/
├── my-extension.openclipext/
│   ├── openclip.json        # manifest
│   ├── main.js              # script
│   └── icon.png
├── wikipedia.openclipext/   # single URL-template action
└── format-sql.sh            # standalone snippet with header metadata

A minimal extension is a folder with one openclip.json:

{
  "identifier": "com.example.wikipedia",
  "name": "Wikipedia",
  "actions": [
    { "title": "Look up", "icon": "symbol(book)", "type": "url",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search={query}" }
  ]
}

Actions can also expose options (strings, booleans, dropdowns, Keychain-backed secrets), gate visibility with app/regex rules, and render rich results — status, notifications, or chained effects — from JSON emitted by a shell script.

• Action kinds — url, javascript (JavaScriptCore with an openclip.* bridge + async/fetch), applescript, shell, textsnippet, keypress, shortcut, service, and group sub-menus.
• Install one-liner — ./scripts/install_extension.sh path/to/extension.openclipext
• From the app — browse and install from the built-in Extension Store in Preferences → Extension Store, or author URL/search/script actions in Preferences → Actions.
• Authoring guide — the full manifest schema, options, visibility rules, and the openclip.* bridge: docs/developer-guide/AGENTS.md.

Building from source

Prerequisites: macOS 14+, Xcode 16+, and XcodeGen (brew install xcodegen).

git clone https://github.com/ganeshmshetty/openclip.git
cd openclip

# Populate the extension catalog submodule
git submodule update --init

# Generate the Xcode project (re-run after adding/removing .swift files)
xcodegen generate

# Build and run
./scripts/dev_run.sh

# Run the test suite
./scripts/test.sh

# Build a Release app + build/OpenClip.zip
./scripts/package_app.sh

Note

The repo is split into a pure-domain Core framework and the OpenClip app target (AppKit + SwiftUI), with XCTest suites for both. The Extensions/ folder is a git submodule hosting the official & community extension catalog (openclip-extensions).

Documentation

The full technical documentation lives in the docs/ hub:

• Architecture — target split, the six core subsystems, popup internals, text selection, and the action-search palette.
• Developer guide — extension package format, manifest schema, and action authoring.
• Runtimes — AppleScript, JavaScript, URL templates, and shell/Python execution (env vars, JSON effects, 30-second watchdog).
• User guide — installation, preferences, app rules, and extension management.
• Logging — the single Log surface and per-subsystem categories.

License

OpenClip is released under the MIT License. Copyright (c) 2026 Ganesh M and OpenClip Contributors.