Sift

Local-first semantic clipboard manager with text and image search.

Search your clipboard history by meaning, not keywords. Works with text, code, URLs, and images — including screenshots. Runs entirely on your machine. No cloud. No account.

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Features

• Semantic search across all clipboard history using natural language
• Image search via CLIP embeddings -> find screenshots by describing what's in them
• OCR on copied images so text content is searchable too
• Cross-platform: macOS, Windows, Linux
• Fully local: No data leaves your machine

Installation

pip install sift-clip

Tesseract is required for OCR (optional but recommended):

# macOS
brew install tesseract

# Ubuntu/Debian
sudo apt install tesseract-ocr

# Windows
# Download installer from https://github.com/UB-Mannheim/tesseract/wiki

Usage

Start the background daemon:

siftd

Search your clipboard history:

sift "the API error from this morning"
sift "architecture diagram with blue boxes"
sift "that JSON I copied yesterday"

Development

git clone https://github.com/yourusername/sift
cd sift
pip install -e ".[dev]"
pytest tests/

License

Sift is licensed under the Business Source License 1.1.

Free for personal, non-commercial use. Commercial use requires a separate license agreement. The license converts to MIT on March 9, 2030.