A fast, light,
private clipboard

Three commitments

Specific enough to be checked. Where macOS limits them, this page says so rather than implying otherwise.

Measured on Apple silicon and asserted by the test suite, not measured once by hand.

What “private” can honestly mean

Most clipboard managers overstate this. Here is the accurate version.

MacCV cannot stop another app from reading the clipboard. Nothing can. If you need that, use Paste Without Clipboard — or don’t put the secret on the clipboard. This page says so plainly because a privacy claim you cannot verify is worse than no claim at all.

Everything the pasteboard holds, not just text

Most managers flatten to a string. Copy a table and you get tab-separated text; copy from a design tool and you get a bitmap. MacCV keeps every representation and replays it byte-for-byte.

A single copy can carry several at once — a paragraph from Safari arrives as plain text, RTF and HTML — and MacCV keeps all of them, so it can paste into whichever the target app asks for.

Updates that do not say “damaged”

An app that replaces itself with a downloaded bundle inherits the quarantine attribute from its parent, and macOS refuses to launch a quarantined, non-notarized replacement. The usual result is the misleading “MacCV is damaged and can’t be opened” dialog. The order of operations is what prevents it.

1. Download to a staging directory
2. Verify the SHA-256 — a mismatch deletes the file and stops
3. Verify the code signature with spctl
4. Only then clear com.apple.quarantine
5. Report which of those actually succeeded

Clearing the flag before verification would defeat the flag entirely — which is why an update whose signature does not validate is reported as such and left quarantined rather than silently installed. MacCV does not swap its own running bundle either: a half-completed replacement of a live app is worse than asking you to drag one file, so the verified bundle is revealed in Finder and you finish the job.

Build it yourself

Requires macOS 27, Xcode 27, Rust 1.85+ and XcodeGen. The engine builds and tests on its own; the Xcode project is generated from a single YAML file.

git clone https://github.com/yxxbc/Maccv.git
cd Maccv

cargo test                      # the Rust engine, 109 tests
cargo build --release -p maccv-ffi

cd apps/mac
xcodegen generate               # project.yml is the source of truth
xcodebuild -scheme MacCV -configuration Release build

Every layer can check itself, including the compiled app, which exercises Swift → C ABI → Rust end to end against a process-private pasteboard so it never touches your real clipboard.

Where it is going