Clipless

The clipboard that reads between the lines.

Clipless quietly remembers everything you copy, then reads it — spotting emails, IPs, tickets and URLs in what you copy and turning them into one-click actions.

✓ Windows, macOS & Linux · ✓ Encrypted local storage · ✓ No account needed

Quick Clips · Tools Launcher · Capture · Theming · Who it's for · Install · Develop

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🔍 Quick Clips

It reads what you copy.

The moment something useful lands in your clipboard, Clipless flags it. A scanner icon appears on the clip — open it to see every pattern it pulled out, ready to act on.

• Automatic detection — emails, IPs, URLs, phone numbers, ticket IDs and your own custom regex
• Pick exactly what you need — each extracted value is individually selectable
• Named capture groups — build a pattern once and reuse it across every clip
• Built-in library — common data types work out of the box, with a clear visual indicator when patterns are found

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⚡ Tools Launcher

One copy. Every tool, open.

Send the data Clipless found straight into the web tools you already use. Select a few patterns, pick your tools, and launch them all at once — no retyping, no tab juggling.

• Multi-token URLs — drop values into any link, e.g. https://tool.com/{ip}/{email}
• Open in bulk — fire off several lookups simultaneously with one click
• Smart compatibility — only the tools that match your available data are offered
• Templates & sharing — match templates automatically and export / import configs for your team

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📋 Capture everything

Every format, deduplicated and in order.

Real-time clipboard monitoring with 250ms polling, intelligent format prioritization, and duplicate prevention — all running quietly in the background so it never interrupts your flow.

Format	What you get
Text	Plain text with automatic programming-language detection
HTML	Rich HTML content with visual indicators
RTF	Full Rich Text Format support
Images	Image clipboard data with preview and generated thumbnails
Bookmarks	URLs with titles (macOS / Windows compatible)

• Lock clips to keep important items from rotating out of history
• Clip Quick Search to filter your entire history instantly

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🌗 Looks right, day or night

Theming that follows you.

Clipless follows your system theme out of the box and flips instantly when you switch — with smooth, considered transitions instead of a jarring flash. Prefer to set it yourself? One dropdown, done.

• Matches your system — respects your OS light / dark preference automatically
• Carefully tuned palettes — readable contrast and soft surfaces in both modes

_{This README does it too — the screenshots above follow your GitHub light / dark setting.}

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✨ The quiet details

The things you don't notice until you'd miss them.

• ⌨️ Global hotkeys — reach recent clips and the launcher from anywhere, even when Clipless is minimized. Quick-clip hotkeys (1–5) grab your most recent items, and a focus hotkey snaps the window to you.
• 🔒 Encrypted storage — history is encrypted with your OS keystore (DPAPI, Keychain or Secret Service) and never leaves your machine. Data is split into domain-specific files for efficient saves, with images stored as separate encrypted files and fast-loading thumbnails.
• 🚀 Non-blocking startup — the window appears immediately while your history loads in the background.
• 🖥️ Starts with you — auto-launch on boot, start minimized to the tray, and update quietly in the background (auto-update is Windows-only for now — see Installing on macOS).
• 💾 Backup-friendly — export and import your clips, patterns, tools and templates.

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👥 Who it's for

Clipless shines anywhere people copy the same kinds of data all day — but nothing about it is locked to one job. Define your own patterns and tools, and it bends to whatever workflow you throw at it.

☎️ Call center & support	🗂️ Data entry & admin	🛡️ Security & research
Copy a customer email or account number and open it across your CRM, billing and knowledge-base tools in a single move.	Bridge legacy and modern systems — extract reference numbers, populate templates and process records in batches without retyping.	Pull IPs, domains and hashes from any text and fan them out to VirusTotal, AbuseIPDB and the rest of your toolkit instantly.

…and whatever you do next. Custom regex patterns, custom tools, custom templates — Clipless is a blank canvas with smart defaults. If you can describe the data and where it should go, you can wire it up. No use case is too niche.

Real-world office scenarios & more roles

Call center & customer support

• Customer data lookup — copy customer emails / phone numbers and instantly open them in CRM, billing or support tools
• Account verification — extract account numbers and open multiple verification tools simultaneously
• Issue tracking — copy error codes or ticket numbers and launch diagnostic tools, knowledge bases and escalation systems
• Multi-system navigation — one copy action can open customer records across 3–4 different systems instantly

Data entry & administrative work

• Form population — use templates to generate standardized text from clipboard data (addresses, contact info, etc.)
• Batch processing — copy reference numbers and open them across multiple validation or processing tools
• Quality assurance — extract identifiers and quickly access audit trails, compliance tools and verification systems
• Cross-platform workflows — bridge gaps between legacy systems by automating tool launches

Real-world scenarios

• Insurance claims — copy claim numbers → open in claims system, fraud detection and payment processing
• Banking support — copy account numbers → access account details, transaction history and compliance tools
• Healthcare administration — copy patient IDs → open in medical records, billing and scheduling systems
• E-commerce support — copy order numbers → launch order management, shipping and customer communication tools

Template-powered productivity

• Standardized responses — create templates for common communications, populated with copied data
• Report generation — templates that format clipboard data into structured reports
• Data transformation — convert between formats required by different systems
• Compliance documentation — generate required documentation with proper formatting from raw copied data

Also a great fit for

• Developers — code snippet management and URL analysis
• Researchers — data extraction and multi-tool workflows
• Security professionals — URL / email analysis and validation
• Content creators — managing copied content across projects
• Power users — anyone who copies lots of data and wants smart organization

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🚀 How to use

Basic usage

1. Install and run — start Clipless and it begins monitoring your clipboard automatically
2. Copy content — anything you copy appears in the Clipless window
3. Click to reuse — click a row number to copy that item back to your clipboard
4. Context menu actions — right-click a clip for Copy, Scan, Lock and Delete

Quick Clips workflow

1. Copy content containing patterns (emails, URLs, etc.)
2. Look for the scanner icon — a blue search icon appears when patterns are detected
3. Click the scanner to open the launcher and see the extracted data
4. Select data — choose which extracted values you want to use
5. Open tools — pick compatible tools to launch with your selected data

Example uses: extract emails and open them in validation tools · pull domains and run them through security scanners · gather multiple data points to research across tools · grab code snippets and open them in your documentation.

Settings & customization

• Access settings — right-click the system tray icon → Settings
• Configure patterns — Settings → Quick Clips → Search Terms
• Add tools — Settings → Quick Clips → Tools
• Set hotkeys — Settings → Hotkeys
• Adjust preferences — Settings → General
• Auto start with system — Settings → General (Windows & macOS)
• Start minimized — Settings → General (start hidden in the tray)

📖 Full reference at clipless.app/docs.

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📥 Installation

Download the latest build for Windows or Linux from the download page or the GitHub releases.

🍎 Installing on macOS

macOS builds aren't code-signed yet. This causes .dmg files downloaded from releases to not immediately work. The sticking point is Gatekeeper: anything downloaded through a browser gets a com.apple.quarantine flag, and macOS refuses to open a quarantined, unsigned app — usually with "Clipless is damaged and can't be opened." The DMG isn't actually damaged; clearing that flag (or building locally, where it's never applied) fixes it. Two ways to install:

Option 1 — Download a .dmg and clear the quarantine flag (recommended)

1. Get the Clipless .dmg for your Mac from a release — arm64 for Apple Silicon, x64 for Intel (or a build artifact)
2. Open it and drag Clipless into your Applications folder
3. Remove the quarantine flag in Terminal:

   xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Clipless.app

4. Launch Clipless normally — Gatekeeper will let it through

Option 2 — Build it yourself (no Terminal step on a downloaded file)

A DMG you compile locally never receives the quarantine flag, so it installs straight away. You'll need the Xcode Command Line Tools (xcode-select --install) and Node.js 20+.

git clone https://github.com/dantheuber/clipless.git
cd clipless
npm ci
npm run build:mac

This produces two disk images in dist/ — clipless-<version>-arm64.dmg (Apple Silicon) and clipless-<version>-x64.dmg (Intel). Open the one matching your Mac and drag Clipless into Applications.

Architecture: macOS releases ship separate .dmg files for Apple Silicon (arm64) and Intel (x86_64). Download the one matching your Mac.

Auto-update: in-app automatic updates don't work on macOS yet, because they require a code-signed app and the macOS builds are currently unsigned. On macOS, update by downloading the latest .dmg from releases and reinstalling. (Windows auto-updates normally.)

⚠️ A note on security warnings during install

Clipless isn't code-signed with a commercial certificate yet, so your OS may warn that the app is from an "unidentified developer" or "untrusted source." This is expected and safe to override — the build comes straight from this open-source repository.

Why this happens

• Windows — "Windows protected your PC" or SmartScreen warnings
• macOS — "cannot be opened because it is from an unidentified developer"
• Linux — some distributions may flag the AppImage as untrusted

Why it's safe

• The application is built from open source code available in this repository
• You can verify build integrity by reviewing the source
• There's no malicious code — this is purely a certificate-signing issue

How to install past the warning

• Windows — click "More info" → "Run anyway", or temporarily disable SmartScreen
• macOS — see Installing on macOS above (clear the quarantine flag, or build locally)
• Linux — make the AppImage executable and run it, or adjust your security settings if needed

Looking ahead — if Clipless gains enough community adoption, a commercial code-signing certificate (several hundred dollars a year) will eliminate these warnings. For now, the warnings are purely administrative and the app is safe to use.

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🧰 Development

Clipless is an Electron app built with electron-vite, React 19, TypeScript and Tailwind CSS v4.

Setup

npm install
npm run dev      # start with hot reload

Scripts

Command	What it does
npm run dev	Start development with hot reload
npm run build	Type-check and build all processes
npm run lint	ESLint with caching
npm run format	Prettier formatting
npm run typecheck	Type-check all TypeScript
npm test / npx vitest	Unit tests (Vitest)
npx playwright test	E2E tests (Playwright + Electron)
npm run build:win · build:mac · build:linux	Platform-specific packaging

Heads up: E2E tests interact with your system clipboard — they read from and write to it. Avoid copying sensitive data before running them, and expect your clipboard contents to be overwritten.

Recommended IDE setup

VS Code + ESLint + Prettier

📄 License

Clipless is released under the MIT License — you're free to use, modify, and distribute it, including in forks and derivative works. The only condition is that the original copyright and license notice be retained, so the original project is always credited.

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Built with Electron, React & TypeScript. Your data is encrypted with your OS-native keystore and never leaves your machine.

clipless.app · Documentation · Download · GitHub