](https://github.com/whispr-dev/pip-clipboard/actions/workflows/build.yml){kind=link}
Never again accidentally paste something you regret.
pip-clipboard is a picture-in-picture clipboard preview that sits in your system tray and shows you what's on your clipboard before you paste it. Think of it as a safety net for your paste key — a small, translucent HUD that catches those moments where the clipboard contains something unexpected before it lands in a chat window, terminal, or email.
Ambient mode — whenever you copy something, a translucent toast appears briefly in the bottom-right corner showing what's now on your clipboard. Text and images are both supported. The toast fades after ~3 seconds without stealing focus from whatever you're doing.
Safe-paste mode — press Ctrl+Shift+V (or Cmd+Shift+V on macOS) to bring up a persistent preview overlay. From there you can confirm the paste with Enter, Ctrl+V, or clicking the content, or cancel with Escape or clicking away. If you confirm, the app injects a native Ctrl+V into whatever application had focus before the preview appeared.
The window itself is always-on-top, frameless, and fully transparent when idle. It never appears in the taskbar. You interact with it through the system tray and the global hotkey.
- Live clipboard preview — text and images, with thumbnails scaled to fit
- Safe-paste confirmation —
Ctrl+Shift+Vshows what you're about to paste and lets you confirm or cancel - System tray — pause monitoring, toggle auto-start, quit
- Auto-start on login — optional, toggled from the tray menu (Windows Registry / macOS LaunchAgent / XDG autostart)
- Close-to-tray — closing the window keeps the app running; quit from the tray menu
- Cross-platform — Windows 10/11, Linux (X11/Wayland), macOS
- Tiny footprint — Rust backend with a WebView frontend via Tauri; a few MB of RAM at idle
Grab the latest release from the Releases page.
| Platform | Format |
|---|---|
| Windows x64 | .exe standalone, .msi installer |
| Linux x64 | .AppImage, .deb, .rpm |
| macOS ARM (Apple Silicon) | .dmg, .app.zip |
| macOS Intel | .dmg, .app.zip |
Prerequisites: Rust, Tauri CLI v2, and platform-specific dependencies (see below).
cd src/v.0.2.2
cargo tauri dev # development mode with hot-reload
cargo tauri build # release build with installerLinux requires additional system libraries:
sudo apt-get install -y \
libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev libappindicator3-dev librsvg2-dev \
patchelf libxdo-dev libx11-dev libxext-dev libxtst-devWindows requires the Visual Studio C++ Build Tools (MSVC linker). WebView2 ships with Windows 10/11 by default.
macOS requires Xcode Command Line Tools. The first run will prompt for Accessibility permissions (required for keystroke injection).
Once running, pip-clipboard lives in the system tray. There's no main window.
| Action | What happens |
|---|---|
| Copy anything | Brief translucent toast shows the clipboard contents |
Ctrl+Shift+V |
Persistent preview overlay — confirm or cancel the paste |
Enter / Ctrl+V / click content |
Confirm paste (injects keystroke to the previous app) |
Escape / click away |
Cancel paste |
| Right-click tray icon | Toggle HUD, pause monitoring, toggle auto-start, quit |
pip-clipboard is not a Windows Service — it needs access to your desktop session for clipboard and keystroke injection. Instead, it runs as a normal user-session app with two features that give it service-like behaviour:
- Close-to-tray — closing the window (or pressing Alt+F4) doesn't exit the app; it keeps running in the tray.
- Auto-start — toggle from the tray menu. On Windows this creates a registry entry under
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run.
For a release build detached from any terminal:
# Windows
Start-Process -WindowStyle Hidden ".\pip-clip-osd.exe"# Linux
nohup ./pip-clip-osd &src/v.0.2.2/
├── src-tauri/
│ ├── src/main.rs # Rust backend: clipboard polling, keystroke injection,
│ │ # tray, global shortcut, window management
│ ├── Cargo.toml # Rust dependencies
│ ├── tauri.conf.json # Tauri v2 app config
│ ├── capabilities/ # Tauri v2 permission declarations
│ ├── build.rs # Tauri build script
│ └── icons/ # App icons (.ico, .png)
├── ui/
│ ├── index.html # Dual-mode layout (ambient toast + preview overlay)
│ ├── app.js # Event handling, keyboard shortcuts, CSS transitions
│ └── styles.css # Glass-morphism dark theme, all visibility via CSS
└── package.json
Key technical decisions:
- Tauri v2 — small binary, native WebView, cross-platform tray and global shortcuts
- arboard — cross-platform clipboard access (text + images)
- enigo 0.2 — keystroke injection for the paste confirmation flow
- Window never hides — WebView2 on Windows destroys page state when the host window is hidden. The window stays visible with a transparent background at all times; CSS handles all show/hide. Transparent pixels are click-through.
- Fingerprint-based change detection — the clipboard watcher polls at 250ms and uses a
DefaultHasherfingerprint (with sampled bytes for images) to detect changes without full-content comparison.
See CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines.
See SECURITY.md for the security policy and how to report vulnerabilities.