Nori

A clipboard history for macOS and Windows that shows every copy as what it is.
糊（のり）= paste. Built from scratch, inspired by Maccy.

⬇︎ Download for macOS  ·  ⬇︎ Download for Windows

What it does

Press ⌘⇧V anywhere. A glass panel opens at your pointer with everything you have copied — text, links, code, colors, images, files — each rendered as its own kind of card. Type to search, press ↩ to paste into the app you were just using, done.

• Typed cards. Links show their host, code is set in monospace, colors get a swatch, images a thumbnail, files their Finder icon. Filter by kind with one keystroke (Tab).
• One action grammar, printed live. ↩ pastes. ⇧ adds plain text, ⌥ adds keep the panel open, ⌘ means copy only. The hint bar at the bottom rewrites itself the moment you hold a modifier, so the shortcut you are about to press is always on screen.
• Stable numbers. Pinned clips sit first and keep their ⌘1…⌘n forever.
• Visible privacy. Anything that looks like a secret (API keys, tokens, private keys, card numbers) is masked, kept in memory only and forgotten after ten minutes. Copies from password managers are never recorded. When something was deliberately not saved, a small ghost row tells you why.
• Honest permissions. Nori pastes by pressing ⌘V for you, which needs Accessibility. Until you grant it, ↩ visibly becomes Copy and the first hint chip is the fix.
• Nothing leaves your machine. No network code at all. History lives in ~/Library/Application Support/Nori (macOS) or %LOCALAPPDATA%\Nori (Windows).
• English and Japanese UI, following your system language.

The same app on Windows:

Install

Both builds come from the same release.

macOS 26 Tahoe or later

1. Download Nori-x.y.z.zip and move Nori.app to /Applications.
2. The build is ad-hoc signed (no Apple Developer ID yet), so clear the quarantine flag once:

   xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Nori.app

3. Launch Nori. The welcome flow lets you pick the hotkey and grant Accessibility (System Settings › Privacy & Security), which is what lets Nori paste for you.

Windows 10 20H2 or later

1. Download Nori-Windows-x.y.z.zip and unzip Nori.exe anywhere.
2. Run it. Nori lives in the tray; press Ctrl+Shift+V to open it. SmartScreen may warn once because the build is unsigned — choose More info › Run anyway.
3. The welcome flow lets you pick the shortcut and decide whether Nori starts with Windows. No permission is needed to paste on Windows.

See windows/README.md for how the Windows version is built and verified.

Or build it yourself:

brew install xcodegen                      # macOS
git clone https://github.com/hocky0301/Nori.git && cd Nori
xcodegen generate && open Nori.xcodeproj   # or: scripts/release.sh
dotnet build windows/Nori.sln -c Release   # Windows (builds anywhere, runs on Windows)

Keyboard

The Windows shortcuts are the same with Ctrl in place of ⌘ (see windows/README.md).

Key	Action
⌘⇧V	Open / close Nori (changeable in Settings)
hold ⌘⇧, tap V again	Step through clips; release to paste
type	Search (any order of words; secrets are never indexed)
↩	Paste the selected clip
⇧↩ · ⌥↩ · ⌘↩	Paste as plain text · paste and keep Nori open · copy only
⌘1 … ⌘9	Paste clip n (⇧ / ⌥ stack)
↑ ↓ · ⌘↑ ⌘↓	Move · jump to first / last
Tab / ⇧Tab	Next / previous filter chip
Space · ⌘Y	Expand the selected card inline
⌘P	Pin / unpin
⌘⌫ · ⌘Z	Delete · undo delete
⌘O · ⌘R	Open link / file · reveal file in Finder
⌘⇧P	Pause capture
⌘,	Settings
Esc	Close

Mouse: hover selects, click pastes, ⇧/⌥/⌘-click add the same bits, right-click shows every chord.

Privacy model

What	Behaviour
org.nspasteboard.ConcealedType (password managers)	Never saved; a ghost row says "Concealed item from 1Password wasn't saved"
TransientType, AutoGeneratedType	Ignored silently
Copies from 1Password, Bitwarden, KeePassXC, Keychain Access, Passwords, Dashlane	Ignored (editable list)
Private keys, AWS / GitHub / OpenAI / Slack / Google keys, JWTs, Luhn-valid card numbers	Masked, memory only, expire after 10 min, never searchable, never pinnable
Pause	5 min / 30 min / until resumed, from the menu bar icon or ⌘⇧P
Storage	Unencrypted SwiftData store in your user library; images stored as PNG only, capped at 10 MB (configurable)

How it works (the interesting bits)

• There is no clipboard notification on macOS. Nori polls NSPasteboard.general.changeCount every 200 ms, freezes the pasteboard into a value (PasteboardSnapshot), and runs a pure, unit-tested decision function over it — privacy markers on the union of types, multi-item merges, Word bookmark stripping, size caps, secret detection — before anything touches the database.
• Pasting from a panel that never activates. The panel is a non-activating NSPanel: it owns the keyboard while open, but the app you came from stays frontmost. On ↩ Nori closes the panel, writes the clip to the pasteboard, and posts a synthetic ⌘V whose key code is found by walking UCKeyTranslate on the ⌘ layer of the current keyboard layout (JIS, AZERTY, Dvorak-QWERTY⌘ all work).
• One grammar, two consumers. ActionGrammar.resolve(base, bits, capabilities) decides what a key does; the hint bar and the context menu render from the same function, so what is printed on screen is by construction what happens.
• Liquid Glass, once. The panel is the only glass surface; cards, chips and keycaps are flat fills over it, which keeps 500 rows scrolling at full frame rate.

A longer write-up in Japanese is drafted in docs/zenn/.

Development

xcodegen generate                       # project.yml → Nori.xcodeproj
scripts/dev-build.sh test               # build + unit tests, noise filtered
scripts/dev-drive.sh launch --seed-demo # in-memory instance with demo clips
scripts/dev-drive.sh cmd open-center    # drive it from the terminal (DEBUG builds only)
scripts/dev-drive.sh shot out.png       # screenshot the panel

Swift 6 with strict concurrency, SwiftUI + AppKit, SwiftData. The only dependency is KeyboardShortcuts.

The Windows version is C# / .NET 10 with WPF, sharing no code but the design: its Nori.Core is a port of the same classification, privacy and search rules, with the test suite ported alongside it.

Known limitations

• Distributed builds are ad-hoc signed (no Apple Developer ID yet).
• No App Sandbox yet.
• Image OCR (searching screenshots by the text in them) is implemented but off by default (Vision's results aren't deterministic enough to test reliably).
• A few apps that ignore a synthetic ⌘V (Chrome Remote Desktop, NetBeans) aren't worked around.
• UI is English and Japanese only.
• The Windows build doesn't have cycle mode (hold the shortcut, tap again to step through clips) yet.

Credits

Nori is a from-scratch app, but it would not exist without Maccy by Alex Rodionov: its source is where the edge cases of macOS clipboard management are documented in code.

© 2026 Kamil Ijuin. The source is published to be read; any other use needs my written permission — see LICENSE. Versions published before 2026-09-19 were under MIT.