WolfClip

Clipboard history for macOS and Linux — the Win+V you were missing.

Press one shortcut in any app, pick anything you copied earlier, and it lands right where you type.

English · Русский

Why WolfClip

• Instant paste. Choose an item and WolfClip pastes it into the app you were in. No extra keystrokes.
• Everything you copy. Text, links, colors, code, images and files, each shown the way it reads best. A swatch for #4F8CFF, a thumbnail for a screenshot, a monospace block for code.
• Find it in a second. Start typing to search, Tab through filters, or press ⌘1–⌘9 to paste one of the first nine items.
• Pins that stay. Keep addresses, snippets and templates at the top. Pinned items never expire.
• Keyboard first, mouse friendly. Arrows, Enter, Escape, plus click, hover actions and a context menu.
• Private by design. Passwords copied from password managers are never recorded. History stays on your computer.
• Native and light. Swift and SwiftUI on macOS, GTK 4 on Linux. No Electron, near-zero CPU while idle.
• Dark, light or system. Speaks English and Russian, picked from your system language.

Install

macOS

1. Download WolfClip-macOS.zip from the latest release and drag WolfClip into Applications.
2. Open it. The app is not notarized by Apple, so the first time macOS asks you to confirm. Open System Settings → Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway, or run:

   xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/WolfClip.app

3. Allow Accessibility when WolfClip asks. It needs this to press ⌘V for you and to open next to the text cursor. Without it, picks are only copied.

WolfClip lives in the menu bar and starts at login. Press ⇧⌘V anywhere.

Build from source

Only the Xcode Command Line Tools are needed:

git clone https://github.com/RakushkaTOP/wolfclip.git
cd wolfclip/macos
./build.sh install          # arm64; UNIVERSAL=1 ./build.sh install for Intel + Apple silicon

Linux

curl -L https://github.com/RakushkaTOP/wolfclip/releases/latest/download/wolfclip-linux.tar.gz | tar xz
cd wolfclip-linux && ./install.sh

The installer checks for Python 3 with GTK 4. If they are missing, it offers to install them with apt, dnf, pacman or zypper. Everything else goes into your home folder. To remove WolfClip, run ./uninstall.sh (add --purge to delete the history too).

Press Super+V in any app.

Session	Shortcut	Auto-paste	Opens at
X11	Built in (Super+V, configurable)	Built in	Mouse pointer
Wayland (beta)	Bind wolfclip --toggle in system settings (Settings has a button for GNOME)	With wtype or ydotool	Placed by the compositor

X11 is the tested setup. On Wayland, WolfClip runs through XWayland to follow the clipboard, and how well that works depends on the compositor. Reports are welcome.

Shortcuts

	macOS	Linux
Open history	⇧⌘V	Super+V
Move	↑ ↓	↑ ↓
Paste	↵ or click	Enter or click
Paste as plain text	⇧↵	Shift+Enter
Paste item 1–9	⌘1–⌘9	Ctrl+1–Ctrl+9
Copy without pasting	⌘C	Ctrl+C
Pin / unpin	⌘P	Ctrl+P
Delete	⌘⌫	Ctrl+Delete
Next / previous filter	Tab / ⇧Tab	Tab / Shift+Tab
Clear search, close	Esc	Esc

The shortcut can be changed in Settings. On macOS, ⇧⌘V replaces "Paste and Match Style" in the apps that use it. Pick ⌥⌘V or another option if you rely on it.

Privacy

• Items that password managers mark as secret are skipped: the org.nspasteboard concealed and transient markers on macOS, the KDE password-manager hint on Linux.
• History is a local file: ~/Library/Application Support/WolfClip on macOS, ~/.local/share/wolfclip on Linux. Nothing is sent anywhere.
• You can pause recording at any time from the menu.

How it works

For the curious

macOS. A menu-bar app in Swift and SwiftUI. It checks the pasteboard change counter a few times per second, which is effectively free. The global shortcut is a Carbon hot key, so it needs no permissions. The history is a non-activating panel: it takes the keyboard without stealing focus from your app, so the paste goes right back where you were. Paste is a synthetic ⌘V. The window is placed at the text caret through the Accessibility API, with the mouse pointer as a fallback.

Linux. Python 3 with GTK 4, no extra Python packages. The clipboard comes from GTK's change notifications. The hot key, focus handling and auto-paste talk to X11 directly (XGrabKey, EWMH, XTest) through ctypes. Terminals get Ctrl+Shift+V automatically. A Docker harness in linux/test runs the app headless on Xvfb for testing.

License

Apache 2.0 © RakushkaTOP. Use it, change it, ship it, even commercially. When you redistribute it, keep the copyright, the license and the NOTICE file that credits the author, and mark what you changed.