Plakke

Hold ⌥, tap V, release to paste. A ⌘Tab-style clipboard switcher for macOS.

Plakke (Frisian for paste) keeps your last 10 clips and lets you flick through them with one hand, the same way you flick between apps. Local only — no sync, no accounts, no network.

The strip is centred on screen, floats above full-screen apps, and never takes focus. The selected card lifts and glows in its type's colour; pinned clips sit to the right of a thin divider.

The switcher

While holding ⌥
tap V	next clip (first tap lands on the previous clip, like ⌘Tab)
⇧ V / ←	previous clip
1 – 9, 0	jump straight to that slot (0 is slot 10)
↑ / ↓	on an image with recognised text: flip the card between image and text (what's showing is what pastes)
space	peek — full-size preview of the highlighted clip (tap again to close)
P	pin / unpin the highlighted clip
U / L / T / R / M	arm transforms: UPPERCASE, lowercase, Tidy whitespace, Reflow paragraphs, Markdown. They stack: value conversion first, then structure (Reflow, Tidy), then case, then Markdown, whatever order you press them; tap again to disarm one
C / J	on a colour: swap #hex ⇄ rgb(). On JSON: pretty-print ⇄ minify. Only offered when the clip is actually one of those
X	on an image: crop. Runs an edge scan and starts from the content it finds; drag the handles to adjust
⌫	remove the highlighted clip from the strip
⌘Z	put back the clip you just removed (while the strip is up)
⏎	paste straight away, without releasing ⌥ (in crop mode: ⏎ pastes, X goes back to the full image, esc cancels)
esc	cancel
release ⌥	paste the highlighted clip (with the armed transform, if any)
release ⌥ while holding ⇧	paste as plain text (also forces OCR text for images)

Pasting moves the clip to the front of the strip, so the thing you just used is one tap away next time.

What makes it nice

• Type-aware cards. Plakke classifies every clip: text, code (monospaced preview), links (domain in bold, URL underneath), colors (#hex renders as a live swatch), images (thumbnail), and files (icons + names).

• Accent glow. Each type has its own color; the selected card scales up with a spring and glows in that color, so you can tell what you're about to paste from across the room.

• Source app badge. Every card shows the icon of the app you copied it from.

• Relative timestamps. "12 sec. ago" beats guessing.

• Frosted glass. ultraThinMaterial panel that adapts to light and dark mode, floats above full-screen apps and every Space, and never steals focus from the app you're pasting into.

• Handles secrets properly. A copy flagged as concealed by a password manager, or coming from a known one (1Password, Bitwarden, Apple Passwords, KeePassXC, LastPass, Dashlane…), becomes a secret: it lives in memory only, never touches the history file (which is itself owner-only and excluded from backups), shows blurred with a lock and a 60-second countdown, can't be pinned, and vanishes when the timer ends. If the source app clears the clipboard sooner (KeePassXC does), Plakke drops it at that moment. Pasting a secret re-flags it as concealed so other clipboard tools ignore it too. One menu toggle turns this into "ignore secrets entirely" if you prefer. Anything shaped like a credential gets the same treatment even when no app flags it: JWTs, AWS/GitHub/Slack/Stripe/Google keys, private-key blocks, and card numbers that carry a real issuer prefix at that issuer's length and pass the Luhn check. The patterns are deliberately narrow — a git SHA, an IMEI or a long order number stays an ordinary clip. Recognised text from an image is screened the same way, so a screenshot of a token isn't written to the history file either.

• Privacy. Pause Recording stops capture until you turn it back on (the menu-bar icon dims so you can't forget), Never Record From ignores a chosen app and forgets what it already left behind, and Forget Clips After drops unpinned clips older than 1, 8 or 24 hours. Clips an app generates itself, or marks transient, are never recorded at all.

• Crop. X on an image opens a crop editor inside peek. It scans the edges first — trimming transparent window shadows and uniform borders like letterboxing or a white page margin — and starts the rectangle at whatever it found, so the common case needs no aiming at all. Drag the corners or edges to adjust, with rule-of-thirds guides and a live pixel readout. Pressing X latches the session: you can let go of ⌥ and use both hands, then ⏎ pastes and esc cancels. The crop applies to the full-resolution original at paste time; the stored file is never touched, so the same clip still pastes whole later. On a photo, where there's no border to find, the rectangle just starts at the full image.

  

• Peek. Space opens a big preview above the strip: full text, the whole image, every file. The preview shows the transformed text if a transform is armed, so you see exactly what will land.

  

• Pinned clips. Pins live to the right of a thin divider and never fall off the strip. Clear History leaves them alone. ⌥-click a clip in the menu bar to pin it from there too.

• Transforms. Arm one with a single key, watch the peek update, release to paste. The hint row only offers the keys that apply to the clip you're on. Markdown is type-aware: links become [host](url), code gets fenced, prose becomes a blockquote. Reflow turns hard-wrapped scans, OCR output and quoted emails back into real paragraphs — the natural companion to ↓ on an image.

• OCR. Every image is run through Vision in the background. A small viewfinder badge appears on the card when text was found; press ↓ to flip the card to its text (↑ flips back), and release to paste whatever is showing. Transforms work on the text too.

• Stays fast. Cards render a short preview, not the clip; text is capped at 1 MB, rich forms at 256 KB; images are re-encoded off the main thread; classification only scans the first 64 KB; history is written asynchronously and coalesced. A very large paste costs one read, not a stalled strip.

• Slides, never overflows. When recents plus pins won't fit the screen, the strip shows a window that follows the selection, with ‹ 3 / 4 › counters at the edges.

• Accessible by default. Reduce Transparency swaps the glass for an opaque panel; Reduce Motion drops the spring and the fades; VoiceOver hears every selection announced ("Link, example.com, 3 of 10, pinned"). Type accents are tuned per appearance so they clear 4.5:1 in both light and dark, and Larger Cards scales the whole strip by 25%.

• Nearly zero config. The menu bar holds your clips, then the things you do — pause, clear history, change the hotkey — and a single Settings submenu for the five things you can set, with Reset to Defaults at the bottom. Every setting is declared once in Settings.swift; the menu is built from that list rather than hand-assembled, so the two can't drift apart.

Download

Grab the latest zip from Releases — universal, for Apple Silicon and Intel, macOS 14 or newer.

1. Unzip it and drag Plakke.app to your Applications folder.
2. Open it. macOS will say it cannot verify the developer — Plakke is signed, but not notarized by Apple, which needs a paid developer account. Click Done.
3. Open System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down to Security, and click Open Anyway next to Plakke. Confirm once; it opens normally from then on.
4. On first launch Plakke asks for Accessibility access — it needs this to watch the ⌥ key and to send ⌘V. Turn Plakke on in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility. The change is picked up straight away, with no relaunch.

Plakke has no Dock icon; look for the clipboard in the menu bar.

Build & run

Requires macOS 14+ and Xcode 15+ (for the Swift toolchain).

make run          # build a universal Plakke.app and open it
./build-app.sh    # the same build on its own; VERSION=1.2.3 sets the version

Both go through build-app.sh, which is also what the release workflow runs — so a local build and a released one are assembled the same way. Without VERSION the app reports 0.0.0-dev; releases take their version from the git tag.

On first launch macOS asks for Accessibility access (needed to watch the ⌥ key and to send ⌘V). Flip the switch in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility and Plakke picks it up automatically — no relaunch needed.

Tip: ad-hoc signatures (make default) change on every rebuild, which makes macOS forget the Accessibility grant. If you iterate a lot, sign with a stable identity: make SIGN_ID="Apple Development: you@example.com"

You can also open Package.swift in Xcode, but you'll still want the Makefile to wrap the binary in an .app bundle with Info.plist (that's what makes it a menu-bar-only app).

Layout

Sources/Plakke/
  main.swift              NSApplication bootstrap (accessory = no Dock icon)
  AppDelegate.swift       wires everything together
  Hotkey.swift            the trigger combo (persisted via Settings) + keycodes
  HotkeyRecorder.swift    the "press a new combo" window
  HotkeyController.swift  CGEventTap state machine: idle → cycling → commit/cancel
  ClipboardWatcher.swift  polls NSPasteboard.changeCount, captures clips
  ClipItem.swift          model + type classification (text/code/url/color/image/file)
  ClipStore.swift         10-item ring, JSON + PNG persistence in ~/Library/Application Support/Plakke
  Paster.swift            writes the clip back (or a transform of it) and synthesizes ⌘V
  Transform.swift         U/L/T/R/M/C/J paste-time transforms (incl. paragraph reflow)
  OCR.swift               Vision text recognition for image clips
  SwitcherController.swift  non-activating NSPanel + selection state
  SwitcherView.swift      the SwiftUI strip and cards
  StatusBarController.swift  menu bar item
  AboutController.swift   the About panel
  Permissions.swift       Accessibility prompt + polling
  Settings.swift          every setting declared once: key, default, label, help text
  Sensitive.swift         credential shapes that become secrets without being flagged
  Formats.swift           hex ⇄ rgb() and JSON pretty ⇄ minify, for the C and J transforms
  EdgeScan.swift          finds the content rectangle: transparency pass, then uniform colour
  ImageCrop.swift         the crop as a fraction of the image, so preview and paste agree
  CropEditor.swift        the AppKit crop surface — handles, guides, pixel readout
  TextLines.swift         Unicode-aware line splitting + size caps, shared by the above
  Scheduling.swift        timers that keep firing while a menu is open
Resources/AppIcon.icns    generated app icon (source: AppIcon-1024.png)
docs/screenshots/         README images, rendered from the real views
build-app.sh              assembles the universal .app; used locally and by CI
.github/workflows/        tag a vX.Y.Z and GitHub builds and publishes the release

Changing the hotkey

Menu bar icon → Change Hotkey…, then press the combination you want. ⌃ and/or ⌥ plus any key; ⌘ and ⇧ are refused (⌘ collides with real shortcuts, ⇧ is used inside the switcher), and so are the keys the switcher itself uses — the digits, the arrows, space, ⏎, ⌫, and P, U, L, T, R, M, C, J, X and Z. If a saved combo later becomes one of those, Plakke falls back to ⌥V rather than colliding with it.

© 2026 iappyx · MIT License, see LICENSE.