SMF·PASTE
Can a prompt replace Paste?
Productivity utilities — macOS automation and desktop utilities
Exhibit tracking slip
Verdict
A clipboard history manager — keep the last N things you copied, searchable, pin the ones you reuse — is a small, well-scoped one-sitting build on macOS. What's genuinely harder to reproduce: iCloud sync across devices, rich previews for every content type, and years of edge-case handling for apps with unusual clipboard behavior.
Exhibit A — The prompt
Received on31.07.2026Build a macOS menu-bar clipboard-history manager. Poll NSPasteboard's change count (or use a lightweight polling loop) to detect new clipboard content, and store each entry — text, image, or file reference — locally in SQLite with a timestamp, source app name, and content type. Show history through a global hotkey (e.g. Cmd+Shift+V) as a searchable, keyboard-navigable list; pressing enter re-copies the selected entry to the pasteboard. Support pinning entries to a persistent pinboard that survives history expiration, and an expiration setting (e.g. auto-delete plain-text entries after N days, keep pinned ones forever). Encrypt the local SQLite database at rest using a key held in the macOS Keychain. Add a basic preview pane for text and images. Do not build iCloud sync, cross-device support, or a plugin system for third-party format handlers — those are out of scope. No account or API key needed; everything is local.Opening prefills the prompt — press enter to run it.
Exhibit B — What you lose
- B.1 iCloud sync across Mac, iPhone, and iPad
- B.2 rich previews for every file and color type
- B.3 years of per-app pasteboard-quirk fixes
- B.4 shared team pinboards
Prior art
Exhibit C — Why people still pay: OS integration polish and maintenance
The clipboard-history loop itself is simple; what's hard to fake is polish across every possible thing someone might copy, and having it just work identically on every Apple device.
Questions
Is my clipboard history private?
It stays local and encrypted at rest with a key from the macOS Keychain — nothing is sent anywhere, since there's no sync feature in this build to send it through.
Will it capture passwords I copy from a password manager?
Yes, by default, since it watches the system pasteboard indiscriminately — add your password manager to an exclusion list, or manually clear sensitive entries, since automatic detection isn't built in here.
Does it sync between my Mac and iPhone?
No — that's the main thing this build gives up. Paste's iCloud sync across devices is real engineering this prompt doesn't attempt.
How far back does the history go?
As far as your configured retention setting and disk space allow — there's no hard cap beyond what you set, unlike some clipboard managers with fixed history limits.
Related tools
Receipt