Cliposaurus 🦕

A lightweight clipboard manager for macOS – it lives in the menu bar, brings up a searchable overlay via a global hotkey, and writes the selected entry back to the native clipboard.

Features (v1)

• Menu bar app without a Dock icon (LSUIElement)
• History for text, images and files (SwiftData, configurable limit)
• Global overlay (Cmd+Shift+C) with instant text focus, live search, arrow-key navigation, Esc to close
• Favorites (Cmd+F) – pinned to the top permanently, marked with a star
• Quick paste Cmd+1…6 for the first six entries
• Automatic paste via Enter / click / quick paste → the entry lands in NSPasteboard and is pasted straight into the target app via a simulated ⌘V (can be disabled; requires Accessibility permission)
• Settings to customize all hotkeys, the history size and the auto-paste behavior
• Localized UI (English base + German) that follows the system language

Requirements

• macOS 14+ (Sonoma) – required for SwiftData
• Xcode 16+
• XcodeGen (brew install xcodegen)

Build & run

./scripts/build.sh          # generates the project and builds it
open build/Build/Products/Debug/Cliposaurus.app

The icon then appears in the menu bar. Press Cmd+Shift+C to open the overlay.

Note (Nix/devenv): If a Nix devenv is active in your shell, it overrides DEVELOPER_DIR, SDKROOT, LD etc. and hijacks Xcode's linker. scripts/build.sh strips these variables before invoking xcodebuild. A direct xcodebuild fails with ld: unknown options in such a shell.

Project structure

Cliposaurus/
├── App/         CliposaurusApp (scenes), AppCoordinator (wiring)
├── MenuBar/     menu bar dropdown
├── Models/      ClipItem (SwiftData @Model)
├── Overlay/     OverlayController (NSPanel) + OverlayModel + OverlayView
├── Services/    ClipboardMonitor, PasteboardService, Shortcuts (hotkey defaults)
└── Settings/    SettingsView (hotkey recorder, history size)

Icons

The app and menu bar icons show a dinosaur logo. The source SVGs are rasterized with rsvg-convert into the PNGs under Cliposaurus/Assets.xcassets/ (the app icon in color, the menu bar icon as a monochrome template for light/dark mode).

Known limitations / roadmap

• No app signing/notarization (dev build, ad-hoc signed)

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please read CONTRIBUTING.md and the Code of Conduct first.

Important: By opening a pull request you agree to the Contributor License Agreement. It keeps your contributions under the GPLv3 and grants the project maintainer the right to also distribute the code under other licenses (see License).

License

Cliposaurus is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 – see LICENSE. This means anyone who distributes the app or builds on it must also release their version's source under the GPLv3. Cliposaurus therefore stays open source permanently.

Dual licensing

The maintainer (Jan Gehring) is the sole copyright holder (secured via the CLA) and additionally offers Cliposaurus under a commercial license. This specifically allows:

• distributing signed binaries via the Mac App Store (whose DRM/terms are incompatible with the GPL), and
• developing proprietary (closed-source) extensions.

As the copyright holder, the maintainer is not bound by their own GPLv3. For third parties only the GPLv3 applies, unless a separate commercial license has been obtained. For commercial licensing inquiries: jan.gehring@gmail.com.

The third-party library KeyboardShortcuts used here is under the MIT license (GPL-compatible).