Clipboard Superpowers

A fast, offline clipboard manager for Windows. Replaces Win+V with a searchable popup: every copy is auto-categorized, pinned, and one click away. Text + images + files, global hotkey, system tray, autostart.

Stack: Tauri v2 + Rust + React 19 + TypeScript + Tailwind v4 + SQLite (rusqlite bundled)

Features

• Master–detail popup — compact history list (grouped by day) on the left, large preview + information pane on the right; glassy, keyboard-first, light/dark
• Capture everything — polls clipboard every 300ms, dedupes via SHA-256 (file drops are domain-tagged so a dir and its path-as-text stay separate entries), re-copies bump to top
• Auto-categories — link / email / color / code (incl. ``` fenced blocks and IDE HTML flavors) / secret / `image` / `file` / `plain`
• Secret hygiene — password:-style clips, OTPs, PEM keys, keyword-less JWTs and provider tokens (sk-, ghp_, AKIA…): skipped by default, or retained locally and listed as •••••••• when the setting is off, revealed one row at a time on request; re-enabling purges them and securely overwrites their bytes on disk. Text search never matches secret content, and a secret's hash is never sent to the renderer, so the list cannot be used to confirm a guess.
• Application attribution — the detail pane shows which app the clip was copied from (GetClipboardOwner, pretty names, degrades silently when unavailable)
• Syntax highlighting — the code preview is tokenized on demand (keywords/calls/strings/numbers/comments); zero libraries, zero capture-time cost, copy-back always uses raw text
• Rich text — IDE/web HTML flavor is sanitized (ammonia) for the preview and written back on copy, so Word/Notion keep formatting
• Search — debounced 200ms, LIKE with %/_ escaped, pinned-first sorting; a date picker filters by local calendar day and combines with typed text (date:YYYY-MM-DD still works)
• Fast by design — list payloads carry 300-char previews (17× smaller IPC on a 1000-row history), one shared SQLite connection, optimistic pin/delete, copy loads the full row by id; see src-tauri/tests/perf.rs
• Popup UX — Ctrl+Alt+V toggles, Esc hides, blur hides, focus refocuses search, paginated list (50/page)
• Tray + autostart — hide-to-tray on X, Show/Hide + Quit menu, launches on login
• Offline — SQLite at %APPDATA%\com.hoss.clipsuper\clipboard.db, images in ...\images\

Install (Windows)

1. Build the installer (see below) or grab it from src-tauri/target/release/bundle/
   • nsis/*.exe — guided setup (recommended)
   • msi/*.msi — enterprise deploy
2. Run it, then press Ctrl+Alt+V — the popup appears. Copy anything to see it show up.

Usage

Action	How
Open / hide	Ctrl+Alt+V, tray → Show/Hide, or click taskbar icon
Browse	Click a row — the preview pane shows the full entry; ↑/↓ work too
Copy	Double-click a row, the Copy to Clipboard button, or double-click value
Paste into previous app	Enter (copies + pastes; file rows open instead)
Open links / files	Open button in the preview pane (browser / Explorer)
Pin / unpin	Pin icon in the preview pane — pinned stays on top, survives pruning
Delete	Trash icon in the preview pane — images also delete the PNG + cache
Filter by type	All Types dropdown
Search	Type to filter; pick a day in the date picker beside the box (date:YYYY-MM-DD also works); Esc clears, Esc again hides
Reveal a secret	Select a •••••••• row, then the eye button — re-hides on window blur and restart; copy works while revealed
Actions menu	Ctrl+K (re-recordable in Settings) — settings + appearance
Quit	Tray → Quit (X only hides to tray)

Secrets are skipped by default. With Skip passwords & OTPs off, secret captures are retained in the local database and listed as •••••••• — you reveal one at a time, and turning the setting back on purges them for good, so that toggle asks you to confirm first and names how many rows it will destroy. History caps at 1000 unpinned items; oldest unpinned items are pruned automatically, secrets included, since they are ordinary visible rows.

Develop

cd E:/dev/clipboard-superpowers
npm install
npm run tauri dev      # Vite on :1560 + Tauri window

Useful commands

npm test                # vitest — api, format, keyboardNav, highlight, imageCache, secret visibility, settings confirm (49 tests)
npx tsc --noEmit        # typecheck
npm run build           # frontend only → dist/
cargo test              # Rust — db, categorize, clipboard, richtext, settings (75 tests), run in src-tauri/
cargo check             # fast Rust check, run in src-tauri/
cargo test --test perf -- --ignored --nocapture   # perf benchmark (run in src-tauri/)
npm run tauri build     # full installer → src-tauri/target/release/bundle/
npm run tauri icon app-icon.png   # regenerate all bundle icons from the source art

Inspect the DB

cargo run --example dump_db   # prints last 20 non-secret rows + total (run in src-tauri/)
                                # secret rows are excluded by design — never printable

Project structure

src/
  App.tsx                 # master-detail shell: topbar, sidebar+preview, toolbar, keyboard
  components/
    EntryList.tsx         # left pane: day-grouped rows, double-click copy, pagination
    DetailPane.tsx        # right pane: stage previews, Information rows, pin/delete/open, secret reveal
    TypeDropdown.tsx      # "All Types" filter menu
    SettingsPanel.tsx     # hotkeys (global + actions), capture toggles, history cap, arm-to-confirm purge, clear
  lib/
    api.ts                # Tauri invoke wrappers + event name
    types.ts              # ClipboardItem, Category, Kind
    categories.ts         # category meta (dot colors, labels)
    highlight.ts          # lazy regex tokenizer for the code preview
    format.ts             # time/day labels, colors, preview truncation
    keyboardNav.ts        # selection math + shortcut combo matching
    imageCache.ts         # base64 thumbnail cache (100-cap)
    metaCache.ts          # file_meta cache
src-tauri/src/
  main.rs / lib.rs        # tray, global shortcut, autostart, window events
  clipboard.rs            # polling, source-app capture, file-drop hashing, PNG save, emit
  db.rs                   # SQLite schema+migrations, preview payloads, insert/bump, prune, secret purge
  commands.rs             # get/search/delete/pin/copy(by id)/paste-by-id/file_meta/ocr
  categorize.rs           # regex categorizer + secret detection (KV, OTP, JWT, provider tokens)
  richtext.rs             # CF_HTML parse/build, sanitize, IDE-code detection
  ocr.rs                  # local WinRT OCR
  settings.rs             # settings load/save (hotkey, actions_hotkey, toggles)
src-tauri/capabilities/default.json  # explicit perms: autostart, global-shortcut, window
design/                  # interactive redesign mockups (v1 cards, v2 master-detail) + QA harness

Configuration

• Hotkey: Ctrl+Alt+V — re-recordable in Settings
• Actions shortcut: Ctrl+K (in-popup only) — re-recordable in Settings
• Poll interval / cap: POLL_INTERVAL_MS = 300, MAX_ITEMS = 1000 in clipboard.rs
• WebView2 profile: app-owned at E:\AppData\ClipboardSuperpowers\WebView2 (webview_profile.rs). Existing profiles are migrated in with transient lock/cache state excluded; the source is kept as *.migrated-bak until the new profile is verified alive; stale LOCK/lockfile artifacts are cleaned on every startup. An inherited user-wide WEBVIEW2_USER_DATA_FOLDER (e.g. another app's) is deliberately overridden — that inheritance caused dead-WebView startups after Windows restarts.
• Window: 820×560 (resizable 640–1100), frameless, visible: false + skipTaskbar: true (tray-first)
• Theme: always dark. The palette lives on :root in src/index.css — there is no light variant, no localStorage key, and no Appearance control. A tray-only hotkey window renders the same glass over any wallpaper, and a light recipe would need its own tint, text contrast, and edge treatment.

Troubleshooting

• Hotkey does nothing — another app grabbed Ctrl+Alt+V, or capabilities missing global-shortcut:allow-register. Check src-tauri/capabilities/default.json.
• App seems dead on launch — by design it starts hidden to tray. Look for the tray icon, press Ctrl+Alt+V.
• Images re-appear after copy — fixed via unified image_hash; if you see it, poller and copy path diverged again.
• DB locked — WAL + 2s busy-timeout is on; don't open clipboard.db with an exclusive lock while running.
• Transparent-window GPU errors — not used; window is solid (transparent: false).
• Application shows "Windows service"/"Windows app" — the copying process was a service or a UWP host; elevated apps may show no Application row at all (owner is unreadable).

Roadmap

Shipped: global hotkey (re-mappable in Settings) · settings surface (hotkeys, capture toggles incl. files + secret-skip, history cap, autostart, hide-on-blur, clear, stats) · search · auto-categories (fenced code, IDE flavors, anchored colors) · secret hygiene with keyword-less token detection · pins · image capture · tray + autostart · always-dark glass theme · optimistic instant copy · re-copy bumps to top · full keyboard control · Enter-to-paste directly into the previous app · password/OTP hygiene · rich-text/HTML clipboard with sanitized preview · Explorer file drops with sizes + open/reveal · local WinRT OCR extraction (zero dependencies, on-device only) · master–detail v2 UI with preview pane and Information rows · application attribution · syntax-highlighted code preview · 17× smaller list payloads + shared DB connection + optimistic actions.

Dropped by design review: cloud sync (fights local-only guarantees, duplicates OS vendors, needs accounts + E2EE + a forever server) · plugin system (multiplier with nothing to multiply yet; custom-actions-lite is the fallback if real extensibility demand appears) · full grammar syntax highlighting (syntect: 10–30MB RAM for preview fidelity we don't need — the lazy regex tokenizer covers the mock's fidelity class).

License

MIT