Taac

macOS clipboard history, with a search box in it.
Hit ⌃⌥V, type two letters, press ↩. Done.

🇬🇧 English | 🇮🇹 Italiano

Taac is a macOS menu bar app that keeps a history of everything you copy and gives it back to you by searching, not by scrolling.

It is a light take on Jumpcut, the classic open source clipboard manager for the Mac. Jumpcut shows an app-switcher-style bezel and lets you cycle the stack while holding the modifiers: great with five clippings, painful with a hundred, because there is no search.

Taac keeps that core — global hotkey, persistent stack, synthetic paste — and replaces blind cycling with a Spotlight-like window: a fuzzy search field, a result list with matched characters highlighted, and ↩ to paste straight back into the app you came from.

No network, no account, no third-party dependencies: ~2,700 lines of Swift and AppKit.

• 🔍 Fuzzy search — dcup finds docker compose up -d --build, with matched characters highlighted.
• ⌃⌥V Global hotkey, works everywhere, rebindable with a shortcut recorder.
• 📋 Automatic capture of copied text, deduplicated: re-copying something moves it to the top instead of duplicating it.
• ⚡ Real paste — reactivates the previous app and sends ⌘V. Use ⌥↩ to copy only.
• 📌 Pin the entries you always need (address, IBAN, email): they stay on top and survive a history wipe.
• 🔢 ⌘1…⌘9 paste the first nine results without touching the arrow keys.
• 🧠 Context on every entry: source app, how long ago, line and character count.
• 🔐 Password manager aware: clippings flagged org.nspasteboard.ConcealedType are never stored.
• 🌍 English and Italian interface, switchable in Settings — or left to follow macOS.
• 🪶 Light: under 1 MB universal binary, no dependencies, nothing running in the background beyond one timer.

Requires macOS 14 or later. Two ways.

You need the Xcode Command Line Tools (xcode-select --install); full Xcode is not required.

git clone https://github.com/ripu/taac.git && cd taac
./build.sh --install --run

An app you build locally never gets quarantined: no Gatekeeper warning, no extra steps.

The binary is signed with a self-signed certificate, not notarized — the Apple Developer Program costs $99/year and this is a personal project. macOS still blocks it on first launch, and since macOS 15 Sequoia the old right-click → Open trick is gone. The actual steps:

1. Download the .dmg from Releases, open it, drag Taac into Applications.
2. Launch it: you get "Apple could not verify … is free of malware" → click Done (the app won't start, that's expected).
3. System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll to the bottom: there's a line about Taac → Open Anyway.
4. Authenticate and confirm. It launches normally from now on.

⚠️ The certificate is mine, not Apple's, so Gatekeeper warns anyway — but the signing identity is stable, so Accessibility survives updates signed with the same certificate. Two exceptions: building from source without CODESIGN_IDENTITY gives an ad-hoc signature, whose identity changes at every build; and replacing the certificate itself costs one re-grant (that happened on 2026-08-05, when it was renamed after the project). Only a Developer ID removes the Gatekeeper step.

1. A clipboard icon appears in the menu bar — no windows, no Dock icon.
2. macOS asks for Accessibility permission: used only to send ⌘V. Without it, Taac copies but does not paste.
3. Press ⌃⌥V and you are set.

./build.sh                      # build into build/Taac.app
./build.sh --run                # build and run without installing
./build.sh --universal          # universal binary, arm64 + Intel
./build.sh --universal --dmg    # produce the distribution DMG

⌘, Settings · ⌘Q Quit

Logs are plain daily files:

~/Library/Logs/Taac/2026-07-30.txt          # normal use
./log/2026-07-30.txt                            # when launched with TAAC_LOG_DIR="$PWD/log"

Format [HH:mm:ss.SSS] [LEVEL] message, levels DEBUG INFO WARN ERROR PERF. Heavy operations (window open, search, menu rebuild, ⌘V dispatch) log their duration in milliseconds.

Open them from the menu bar → Open log folder.

Development flags:

./build/Taac.app/Contents/MacOS/Taac --show-panel                  # open the window
./build/Taac.app/Contents/MacOS/Taac --query "arch" --show-panel   # with a pre-filled query
./build/Taac.app/Contents/MacOS/Taac --snapshot out.png            # render the window to PNG, then exit
./build/Taac.app/Contents/MacOS/Taac --icon-preview icon.png        # render the menu bar icon at 8×
./build/Taac.app/Contents/MacOS/Taac --demo out/                    # re-record the README tour GIF

• SODE.md — architecture, flows, decisions (Italian). Read before changing anything.
• CHANGELOG.md · CONTRIBUTING.md · SECURITY.md
• User guide — opens from the app: menu bar icon → Guide. It follows the language you picked in Settings. It is a self-contained HTML page in docs/guide/; GitHub shows its source rather than the rendered page, so open it from the app or locally in a browser.

The paste window — full history, pinned entries on top, shortcuts always visible:

Search — filters as you type, matched characters highlighted, window shrinks to fit:

Fuzzy search — dcup finds docker compose up -d --build:

MIT · inspired by Jumpcut