ClipStack

ClipStack is a small macOS menu-bar clipboard history app built with Swift and SwiftUI.

It watches NSPasteboard.general for text clipboard changes, keeps a local history of copied text, and lets you copy older items back to the clipboard from a menu-bar popup.

How It Works

• Runs as a menu-bar app using MenuBarExtra with .window style.
• Polls NSPasteboard.general.changeCount every 1 second.
• Stores text-only clipboard items.
• Ignores empty strings and duplicate latest items.
• Avoids re-adding items copied internally from ClipStack.
• Persists history as Codable JSON at:

~/Library/Application Support/ClipStack/history.json

• Stores settings in UserDefaults.

Requirements

• macOS 13 or newer.
• Xcode 14 or newer.
• Swift 5.7 or newer.

Build

From the project directory:

swift build

Run tests:

swift test

Package As A macOS App

Build and package the app bundle:

scripts/package_app.sh

This creates:

dist/ClipStack.app

The bundle is ad-hoc signed locally.

Install

After packaging, move the app to Applications:

cp -R dist/ClipStack.app /Applications/ClipStack.app

Then launch it:

open /Applications/ClipStack.app

You can also run it directly from the project:

open dist/ClipStack.app

Use

• Click the ClipStack menu-bar icon to open clipboard history.
• Click a history item to copy it back to the clipboard.
• Use the search field to filter history.
• Click the trash button next to an item to delete it.
• Click Clear History to remove all saved items.
• Toggle Pause Monitoring to stop or resume clipboard capture.
• Click Open Settings to configure max history size and monitoring pause state.

Keyboard shortcuts:

• Command + Delete: Clear history.
• Command + P: Pause monitoring.
• Command + ,: Open settings.

Settings

ClipStack currently supports:

• Max history size, default 100.
• Pause monitoring toggle.

The max history size is clamped between 1 and 1000.