maCopy

A lightweight macOS clipboard manager that lives in your menu bar. Built with Tauri 2, React, TypeScript, and SQLite.

Features

• Menu bar app — no dock icon, stays out of your way
• Global hotkey — Cmd+Shift+V opens the window from anywhere
• Clipboard monitoring — polls every 500ms for text, images, and file paths
• Full-text search — instant filtering via SQLite FTS5
• Quick paste — Cmd+1 through Cmd+9 to paste the Nth item
• Pin entries — pinned items stay at the top and are never auto-deleted
• Context menu — right-click for Copy, Pin/Unpin, Delete
• Auto-trim — keeps the last 500 entries by default (configurable: 100/500/1000)
• Dark/light mode — follows macOS system appearance
• Privacy — whitespace-only entries are ignored; pause monitoring from the tray

Prerequisites

• macOS 10.15+
• Rust 1.77+ — install via rustup
• Node.js 18+ and npm
• Xcode Command Line Tools — xcode-select --install

Quick Start

git clone <your-repo-url> maCopy
cd maCopy
npm install
npm run tauri dev

The app will compile the Rust backend, start the Vite dev server, and launch the menu bar app.

Development

Project Structure

maCopy/
├── src/                        # React + TypeScript frontend
│   ├── main.tsx                # Entry point
│   ├── App.tsx                 # Main app: routing, keyboard nav, polling
│   ├── index.css               # Tailwind v4 + custom theme tokens
│   ├── types.ts                # Shared TypeScript types
│   ├── test/                   # Test setup and factories
│   │   ├── setup.ts
│   │   └── factories.ts
│   └── components/
│       ├── SearchBar.tsx       # Auto-focused search input
│       ├── ClipboardList.tsx   # Entry list with time-ago, pin badges
│       ├── ContextMenu.tsx     # Right-click: Copy / Pin / Delete
│       └── SettingsPanel.tsx   # Toggles + max history + clear all
├── src-tauri/                  # Rust backend
│   ├── Cargo.toml
│   ├── tauri.conf.json         # Tauri config, permissions, window
│   └── src/
│       ├── main.rs             # Binary entry point
│       ├── lib.rs              # App setup: tray, hotkey, window behavior
│       ├── clipboard.rs        # Background polling thread (500ms)
│       ├── db.rs               # SQLite CRUD + FTS5 + auto-trim
│       └── commands.rs         # Tauri IPC commands
├── package.json
├── vite.config.ts
├── vitest.config.ts
└── tsconfig.json

Scripts

Command	Description
npm run tauri dev	Run the app in development mode with hot reload
npm run tauri build	Build a release .app bundle
npm test	Run frontend tests (vitest)
npm run test:watch	Run frontend tests in watch mode
npm run test:rust	Run Rust backend tests
npm run test:all	Run all tests (frontend + backend)

Tech Stack

Layer	Technology
Framework	Tauri 2
Frontend	React 18, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS v4
Backend	Rust, rusqlite (bundled SQLite)
Clipboard	arboard for cross-platform access
Search	SQLite FTS5 with content-sync triggers
Hotkey	tauri-plugin-global-shortcut
Autostart	tauri-plugin-autostart
Testing	vitest + @testing-library/react (frontend), cargo test (backend)

Architecture

Clipboard Polling

A dedicated Rust thread polls the system clipboard every 500ms using the arboard crate. Each new clipboard value is hashed (SHA-256) and compared against the last known hash to avoid duplicates. Text, images (stored as base64 PNG data URIs), and file paths are all captured.

SQLite + FTS5

The database uses a content-synced FTS5 virtual table with triggers that automatically keep the full-text index in sync with the main clipboard_entries table. This enables instant prefix search as you type.

Window Behavior

The window is frameless, always-on-top, and hides when it loses focus — behaving like a native macOS popover. Clicking the tray icon or pressing Cmd+Shift+V toggles visibility.

Data Storage

The SQLite database is stored at:

~/Library/Application Support/maCopy/clipboard.db

Testing

Frontend (31 tests)

npm test

Tests cover all four UI components: SearchBar, ClipboardList, ContextMenu, and SettingsPanel. Tauri APIs are mocked so tests run in jsdom without the native runtime.

Backend (27 tests)

npm run test:rust

Tests use in-memory SQLite databases and cover: CRUD operations, FTS5 search, auto-trim with pin preservation, settings persistence, SHA-256 hashing, and PNG encoding.

All tests

npm run test:all

Building for Release

npm run tauri build

The built .app bundle will be in src-tauri/target/release/bundle/macos/.

License

MIT