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clipboarder

clipboarder

A clipboard for humans and coding agents. Searchable history, smart classification, native macOS overlay, scriptable CLI.

Install For Agents

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shakedaskayo/clipboarder/main/install.sh | bash

Main view

The clipboard is working memory. clipboarder makes it shared.

For 40 years humans have used the clipboard as scratch space between apps — copy an error from your terminal, paste into Slack; copy a snippet from Stack Overflow, paste into your editor. You use the clipboard as glue between contexts dozens of times a day.

Coding agents can't. Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and every other LLM assistant lives inside its context window. It can't see what you just copied from your terminal. It can't put a generated command on your clipboard for you to paste somewhere else. It can't recall what you copied ten minutes ago.

clipboarder fixes that. The same searchable history that powers the GUI overlay is exposed to your agent through a tiny CLI — cb cp to drop something on your clipboard, cb p to read what's there. Your agent uses the clipboard the way you do.

# Agent runs:
cb p
# → prints your most-recent clipboard entry to stdout

Use case — "fix the error I just copied": the agent calls cb p, gets the stack trace, generates a fix.

# Agent runs:
echo "cargo update -p tokio" | cb cp
# → puts the fix on your clipboard, AND in clipboarder history

Use case — "give me a command I can paste in terminal": the agent calls cb cp, then says "⌘V into terminal". Zero manual copy-paste between you and the agent.

cb p --kind repo --grep "auth"
# → most-recent GitHub URL matching "auth"

Use case — "find that PR URL I copied earlier": agent calls cb p --grep and returns the link in under 2 ms.

cb pin 42   # agent stars an item to survive history limits
cb watch    # stream new copies as JSON Lines as they happen

Use case — "remember this for next session": agent pins items it wants persistent recall on.

One-liner Claude Code skill

mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills/clipboarder && \
  curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shakedaskayo/clipboarder/main/agents/.claude/skills/clipboarder/SKILL.md \
    -o ~/.claude/skills/clipboarder/SKILL.md

Claude Code auto-loads the skill on its next session. No plugin install, no config edit. The skill triggers on phrases like "what did I copy", "find that link I had", "save this for later".

For LangChain / OpenAI Assistants / Cursor / any other harness → For agents (JSON schema, tool definitions, privacy guidance, secret-detection heuristics).

Why clipboarder

Built for agents, beloved by humans

A polished native overlay AND a cb CLI on your PATH. Both read the same SQLite history. Same data, two interfaces.

SQLite FTS5 with bm25 ranking. Sub-millisecond results across thousands of items, even on a cold cache.

Smart classification

Every copy is auto-tagged at capture time: text, URL, email, code, color, image, file, PDF, music link, video link, repo.

Rich previews

Color swatches with HEX/RGB/HSL. Inline PDF embed. Branded music/video cards. Repo cards for GitHub/GitLab with OpenGraph hero.

Source app icons

Each row shows the real icon of the app you copied from — Safari, VS Code, Figma — extracted live via NSWorkspace.

Private by default

All data stays local. No telemetry. No cloud. No account. Privacy exclusions keep password managers out of history.

A preview for every kind

Repo card

Spotify card

Color swatch

Code preview

Settings panel

How It Works

       ┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
       │                  Your macOS clipboard                  │
       │                    (NSPasteboard)                      │
       └─────────────┬──────────────────────────┬───────────────┘
                     │                          │
              read   │                          │  write
                     ▼                          ▼
┌──────────────────────────┐         ┌──────────────────────────┐
│   GUI overlay (⌘⇧V)      │         │   cb CLI                 │
│   for humans             │         │   for agents + shells    │
│                          │         │                          │
│   Search, filter, paste  │         │   cb cp / cb p / cb pop  │
└─────────────┬────────────┘         └─────────────┬────────────┘
              │                                    │
              └─────────────────┬──────────────────┘
                                ▼
              ┌─────────────────────────────────┐
              │  SQLite + FTS5 (local, on disk) │
              │  ~/Library/Application Support/ │
              │   com.clipboarder.app/          │
              └─────────────────────────────────┘

A Rust thread watches NSPasteboard change-count. Every copy is classified, deduplicated via SHA-256, persisted with FTS5 triggers keeping the search index in sync. The overlay is a frameless transparent Tauri window that floats above other apps. Selecting an item writes it back to the pasteboard, hides the overlay, deactivates clipboarder (so macOS surfaces your previous app), and synthesizes ⌘V via CGEventPost. The CLI talks to the same SQLite store directly — works whether or not the GUI is running.

Get Started

Open Source

clipboarder is MIT-licensed and lives on GitHub.