📎 ClipStash

A tiny, 100% offline clipboard history manager for macOS. Lives in your menu bar, remembers your recent clippings, and never touches the network — by design and by proof.

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Why this exists

This started as plain curiosity.

I was looking at a popular Mac clipboard manager and asked a simple question: can this app see everything I copy — and could it send that somewhere? A clipboard manager reads your clipboard constantly (that's the whole job), so the only thing that really matters for privacy is whether it can phone home.

So I inspected it. On macOS you can read any app's sandbox entitlements and its linked frameworks to see what it's actually capable of:

codesign -d --entitlements - "/Applications/SomeClipboardApp.app"   # capabilities
otool -L "/Applications/SomeClipboardApp.app/Contents/MacOS/..."    # linked libraries

The app I looked at was reputable and the network access it had was for ordinary things (checking for updates, validating a license) — nothing nefarious. But it did declare network access and bundle networking frameworks, which means the capability to read your clipboard and make network calls lives in the same process. For something that sees every password, token, and private note you ever copy, "trust me" wasn't quite the answer I wanted.

So instead of trusting, I built one I could prove is offline. The entire app — code, icon, build script, this README — was created in a single ~30-minute session with Claude Code The interesting part wasn't just that it wrote the Swift; it's that it could verify the privacy claim the same way I audited the original app — inspecting entitlements, linked frameworks, and live network connections, and showing the receipts.

The proof

ClipStash has no network entitlement, links no networking frameworks, and contains zero networking code. You can confirm all three yourself:

# 1. Capabilities the OS grants it — should be empty
codesign -d --entitlements - "/Applications/ClipStash.app"

# 2. Linked libraries — only AppKit / Foundation / Swift runtime, no CFNetwork / Network.framework
otool -L "/Applications/ClipStash.app/Contents/MacOS/ClipStash"

# 3. Live connections while it runs — should print nothing
lsof -i -nP | grep -i clipstash

# 4. The source — grep for any networking API
grep -Eni 'URLSession|URLRequest|Socket|Network\.|http|connect\(' main.swift

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Features

• 📎 Menu-bar only — no Dock icon, stays out of your way
• 🧠 Remembers your last 25 text clippings — click any one to copy it back
• ⌨️ Number shortcuts (⌘1–⌘9) for the most recent clippings
• 🔒 Password-aware — ignores clipboard content that apps mark concealed or transient (org.nspasteboard.ConcealedType / TransientType), so most password managers' copies are never recorded
• 🫥 Memory-only — history lives in RAM and is forgotten when you quit. Nothing is written to disk, ever.
• 🚀 Launch at Login — optional toggle in the menu (uses Apple's modern SMAppService)
• 🌐 No network. At all. — verifiable, not just promised (see above)

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Build & install

Requires macOS 13+ and the Swift toolchain (Xcode or Command Line Tools — xcode-select --install).

git clone <your-repo-url> ClipStash
cd ClipStash
./build.sh --install      # builds the icon + app, installs to /Applications, and launches it

Or just build without installing:

./build.sh                # produces ./ClipStash.app
open ClipStash.app

After first launch, look for the 📎 icon in your menu bar. To start it automatically on login, open the menu and click Launch at Login.

Note on Gatekeeper: the app is ad-hoc code-signed (free, no Apple Developer account), which is enough to run on Apple Silicon. If macOS warns about an unidentified developer on first open, right-click the app → Open, or remove the quarantine flag: xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/ClipStash.app".

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How it works

About 150 lines of Swift:

• An NSStatusItem puts the 📎 in the menu bar.
• A Timer polls NSPasteboard.general.changeCount twice a second. When it changes, the new string is read and pushed to the front of an in-memory list (deduped, capped at 25).
• Clicking a menu item writes that string back to the pasteboard.
• Concealed/transient pasteboard types are skipped so secrets aren't captured.
• That's it. No storage, no accounts, no servers.

File	Purpose
main.swift	The whole app
make_icon.swift	Renders the app icon (blue square + white paperclip) into an .icns
Info.plist	Bundle metadata (LSUIElement = menu-bar-only)
build.sh	Compiles, bundles, signs, and optionally installs

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A note on the name

This project is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or derived from any commercial clipboard manager. It was written from scratch. It was briefly prototyped under a different working name during development; it was renamed to ClipStash before publishing specifically to avoid any confusion with existing trademarked products. If you believe there's still a naming conflict, please open an issue.

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License

No license yet. Until a LICENSE file is added, default copyright applies, which means others may view this code but may not legally reuse, modify, or redistribute it. A permissive license (e.g. MIT) will likely be added soon — until then, treat it as source-available, not open-source.

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Acknowledgements

Built with Claude Code in one short session — including the privacy audit that started the whole thing.