🐦‍⬛ Corvo

A corvo is a raven: a bird that hoards small bright things and remembers where it put them. The app does the same with your clipboard. It lives in the menu bar, has no Dock icon, and never talks to the network.

brew tap Wylp/corvo https://github.com/Wylp/Corvo
brew install --cask corvo

The cask lives in this repository, which is why brew tap comes first — Corvo is not in homebrew/cask.

Corvo is ad-hoc signed, not signed with a Developer ID and not notarized by Apple. macOS will refuse to open it the first time and say it cannot be verified. To open it anyway:

1. Open System Settings → Privacy & Security
2. Scroll to the security section — there is a line saying "Corvo" was blocked
3. Click Open Anyway and confirm

You do this once. If you would rather not trust an unnotarized binary, build it from source below — the result is the same app.

The first time you paste, Corvo tells you the permission is missing and offers to open System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility. Switch Corvo on there and paste again.

It needs the permission to press ⌘V for you in the app you came from; there is no other way for one app to type into another. Without it Corvo still works, it just stops one step short: the clipping goes onto your clipboard and Corvo tells you so, and you paste it yourself. Capture, search, tags and pinning need no permission at all.

The panel is a keyboard tool. Every shortcut is printed along its bottom edge, so you never have to remember this table.

Hold ⇧ and click to take several clippings at once, from the last one you touched to the one you click. ⏎ or ⌘C then act on all of them: text arrives joined by newlines in list order, and a run of files arrives as several files. ⇧← and ⇧→ do the same from the keyboard, and any plain click or bare arrow drops the run again.

Typing goes straight to the search box, which matches the clipping's content and the name of the app it came from — so slack finds everything you copied out of Slack without touching the sidebar.

A tag is not just a label. It can carry a rule, and a tag with a rule tags matching clippings on its own, as they are captured.

A rule is a regular expression, a source app, or both together. With both, they must both match.

Tagged clippings are also exempt from retention: they never expire and do not count towards the history limit. Tagging is how you say "keep this".

Resuming a Claude Code session means copying a command with a UUID in it:

claude --resume 550e8400-e29b-41d4-a716-446655440000

The UUID tells you nothing. A week later you have eleven of them and no idea which one was the auth refactor. This is the case Corvo's rule tags were built for.

Open the panel with ⌘⇧V, press ⌘⇧T for the tag manager, then ⌘N for a new tag:

As you type the pattern, the editor tells you whether it compiles and how many clippings you already have that it would catch, with a sample. That number is the fastest way to know a regex does what you meant, before it is ever saved.

From then on, every resume command you copy arrives already tagged, and Corvo asks you what to call it — "auth refactor", "the migration one". The name is searchable, so ⌘⇧V and typing auth brings back the command that resumes it.

The question arrives as a notification with a text field in it: type the name into the banner and press Save. No window opens and nothing takes your focus, so you can answer it or ignore it. Ignoring it costs nothing — the clipping is already saved and already tagged, and its card says Name this (⌘R) until you give it one. Copy ten matching things in a row and you get one notification for the most recent, not ten stacked up.

Corvo asks for notification permission the first time a rule actually catches something it wants named, not at launch. Say no, or never see the banner, and naming still works: open the panel and press ⌘R on the card.

Because tagged clippings never expire, those sessions stay findable no matter how much you copy over them.

If you want the rule applied to the history you already have, use Apply to existing… — it tells you how many clippings will be tagged and asks first, because Corvo has no undo.

A source-only rule ignores text entirely, so it catches images and files from that app too. A pattern rule sees the text of a text clipping and the filename of a file clipping; it never sees an image, so a loose pattern will not swallow every screenshot you take.

The history is not encrypted. It is a plain SQLite database at ~/Library/Application Support/Corvo/corvo.sqlite, with copied images stored as files beside it in blobs/. Anything with read access to your home directory — another app you run, a backup, someone at your unlocked machine — can read every clipping. Decide with that in mind.

Copied files are kept by reference: Corvo stores the path, never a copy of the contents.

Two things keep secrets out:

• Concealed and transient content is discarded. Password managers mark what they put on the clipboard with org.nspasteboard.ConcealedType, and Corvo drops those copies without recording them. TransientType is dropped the same way. This depends on the source app doing the marking — an app that does not is not covered.
• A blocklist of apps. In Settings, list the bundle identifiers whose clippings are never recorded at all.

Because tagged clippings never expire, think twice before writing a rule that tags credentials: it would keep them forever, in a database that is not encrypted.

Nothing leaves your machine. Corvo has no network code, no account and no sync.

By default the history keeps 1000 clippings for 30 days, both adjustable in Settings. Pinned and tagged clippings are exempt.

Honest list of what the tag editor exposes or what people ask for, and what is not built:

• Sync between machines, OCR on images, a snippet editor, encryption of the history at rest.

Corvo.xcodeproj is generated by XcodeGen and is not committed, so you need XcodeGen to build:

brew install xcodegen
make build     # Debug build
make test      # the test suite
make run       # build and launch, replacing any running copy
make release   # build/Corvo.zip, the release artifact

Everything lands under build/, including the Debug build. Xcode would otherwise derive that location from the project's path, which gives every git worktree its own — and make run would launch every copy it could find.

The only runtime dependency is GRDB.swift, resolved by Swift Package Manager.

To publish a release, tag it and push — .github/workflows/release.yml builds the zip and attaches it to the GitHub release. The cask's sha256 then comes from:

curl -sL https://github.com/Wylp/Corvo/releases/download/v0.1.0/Corvo.zip | shasum -a 256

Paste that digest into Casks/corvo.rb and bump version.

Corvo is written in English. Translations are welcome via Sources/Corvo/Resources/Localizable.xcstrings — open it in Xcode's String Catalog editor. Brazilian Portuguese is registered and currently empty, so a pt-BR machine shows English until someone fills it in.

GNU AGPL-3.0. If you run a modified Corvo as a network service, the AGPL requires you to offer your users its source.