Justin Stach

I remixed a clipboard manager

I got tired of paying a subscription for a clipboard manager, so I went looking for a good-enough one. I found ClipHistory by Weiyuan Kong: it’s fast, native Swift, encrypted, no telemetry, and small enough that it fits on a floppy. It’s really a lovely piece of work. The engine, the capture, the AES-256-GCM encryption, the per-app exclusions, all theirs and all untouched.

But of course, I’m a prissy little designer, so seven (plus or minus 2) things niggled at me and I couldn’t quite leave it as it was[1].

So I just sorted out the seven things.

That’s the whole story and it’s uninteresting, but still… what I did do was not bother to build another clipboard manager, a pretty good one already existed. The thing that used to be a blocker for me was never “I can’t write Swift”, it was “is it worth a week or two to bend someone else’s good work into the exact shape I want”. Forking meant adopting a maintenance burden I’d resent by month two. The friction of personalising has now dropped so far that the only scarce input left is that perennially weaselly word ‘taste’, or the skill of knowing precisely what bothers you and being unwilling to live with it.

The bottom tray rising with large preview cards

So my fork has a bottom tray that rises with large preview cards you scan left to right, file support alongside text and images, formatting preserved on paste, and a quieter popup that opens straight into search with no branding header. None of it is clever. All of it is mine.

This is the same impulse that produced B2, just the other way around: B2 was building the tool that didn’t exist because it’s so horribly niche. ClipHistory is remixing a tool that did. Both arrive at the same place: exactly what I wanted, owing nothing to anyone’s roadmap but my own (which is a place I am really having a lot of fun hanging out in).

We’re in a strange, good phase for this. The off-the-shelf tool no longer has to be the final answer. If you can precisely name the seven things, you can make your own remix (and if you do, let me know!).

Credit, of course where it’s due: ClipHistory is Weiyuan Kong’s. Go read the original for how it actually works. I just funked it up a little.

  1. Unfortunately this happened right around the same time my (near) lifelong co-enabler Tristan Blackwell must have been thinking the same thing and asked when I was going to make one and charge him a dollar a month… ↩︎