All notable user-facing changes, feature additions, and improvements to OpenClip are documented here.
- Direct Action Search: Launch straight into the search palette via shortcut, centered on screen with instant focus, and dismiss cleanly with
Escape. - Search Alignment Clamping: Fixed search palette positioning so it never overflows the action bar or screen bounds.
- Layered Glass Theme Contrast: Upgraded glass surfaces with an adaptive backing scrim and specular borders to eliminate background bleed-through.
- Preferences Polish: Renamed settings labels to "Horizontal Position" and "Popup Width" with updated translations.
- Extension Store Resilience: Added network retry handling, loading states, and offline diagnostics to the in-app extension store.
openclip.pasteboardJavaScript Extension API: Extensions can now read, inspect, and write clipboard content directly with granular type support and change-count tracking.- Customizable Popup Alignment & Vertical Positioning: Configure popup bar alignment (Left, Center, Right) and vertical placement (Auto, Above cursor, Below cursor) in Preferences, with synchronized sub-action bar tracking (#52).
- Full Multilingual Localization & Search: Added complete UI translations for Traditional Chinese (
zh-Hant), French (fr), and Japanese (ja), along with multi-lingual action search keyword indexing. - Storefront & Actions Tab Overhaul: Redesigned extension storefront with category filter tabs and pagination, plus an NSOutlineView-based Actions preference hierarchy with zebra striping and drag-and-drop improvements.
- Snooze & App Pause Rules: Temporarily pause OpenClip from the status bar menu (15 min, 1 hour, etc.) or configure per-app pause toggles.
- Extension Runtime Script Budget & Interactive Cancellation: Enforced a 60-second execution watchdog across process runners and added interactive task cancellation for long-running scripts.
- Native AXWebArea Selection Cascade: Accelerated selection detection across Chromium and WebKit browsers with direct AXWebArea integration and multi-app selection resilience.
- Status Bar Menu Enhancements: Added snooze presets, per-application pause toggles, and refined popup dismissal responsiveness.
- Preferences UI Polish: Added sectioned storefront views with filter tabs, rendered pagination triggers, and aligned group indicators.
- Extension Security: Prevented path traversal and unauthorized script execution in extension manifests (#38).
- Clipboard & Pasteboard Preservation: Preserved lazy pasteboard items and prevented clearing untouched clipboards (#34).
- Delivery Context & Paste Races: Guarded against application-switch paste races by snapshotting delivery context at trigger time (#41).
- Secret Staging Race: Eliminated file permission race conditions during secret storage staging with self-healing recovery (#49).
- Update Flow & Sparkle Integration: Improved release notes presentation in update prompts and preserved user settings across version updates.
- Action Group Sheets & Drag-and-Drop: Fixed group creation sheets and improved reordering in Preferences.
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- Context-Aware Web Search: When triggered inside a supported web browser (Safari, Chrome, Arc, Brave, Edge, etc.), web searches now open directly in the active browser rather than defaulting to the system default browser (#25).
- Configurable Bar Width Slider & Dynamic Packing: Replaced fixed page sizes with an intuitive 5-level bar width slider and dynamic page packing in the floating popup HUD.
- Command Line Flags: Added CLI support for
--version/-vand--help/-hflags for quick version and usage inspection from the terminal (#29). - Extension Local Icon Validation: Added automated verification in
validate_extension.shto ensure referenced local icon files exist and are accessible (#30).
- Action Group Persistence: Preserved custom user action group configurations and member assignments across extension updates and catalog reloads (#24).
- Toast Positioning: Centered toast notifications in-place directly over the closed popup frame to prevent visual jumps during action execution.
- Extension Update Error Reporting: Enhanced extension updater to log and surface individual update failures instead of silently dropping errors (#32).
- Calendar Event Cleanup: Ensured temporary
.icsevent files are cleanly removed following Calendar imports with strict regular-file verification (#31). - Settings Type Safety: Replaced unsafe force-casts in
SettingsStore.getwith safe fallback defaults (#26). - Documentation & Localization: Synchronized documentation with Swift 6 and updated contributing prerequisites for Xcode 16+ (#28).
- Custom Action Groups & Sub-Action Bar: Group multiple actions and extensions together into unified action items. Hovering reveals a floating horizontal sub-bar for instant sub-action selection, and clicking opens a scoped search palette.
- Simplified Chinese Localization: Full UI localization in Simplified Chinese (
zh-Hans), adapting automatically to macOS system language preferences. - Search Engine Presets: Added one-click engine presets (Google, DuckDuckGo, Kagi, Brave Search, Bing, Ecosia, and Custom) to the built-in Search action settings.
- In-App Software Updates: Integrated Sparkle 2 updater with automatic background update checks, status bar notifications, and release note presentation.
- AI Loading Toast Lifecycle: AI preset execution displays a non-blocking floating loading toast, smoothly transitioning to streaming result cards upon receipt.
- Toast UI Scaling: Result toasts and copy notifications scale dynamically with user-selected
popupScalepreferences. - Menu Bar Icon Visibility Toggle: Added an option in General Preferences to hide the menu bar icon while keeping hotkey and selection triggers active.
- Cursor Stickiness: Resolved cursor stickiness across popup panel edges by installing AppKit tracking areas and asserting arrow cursors on interactive views.
- Sub-Bar Coordinate Hit-Testing: Fixed sub-bar hover state tracking using window coordinate conversions and dynamic click-through ignore handling.
- AI Session State: Preserved AI streaming session identifiers and active tasks across loading toast state transitions.
- Empty Action Group Support: Allowed creating and configuring empty action groups from Preferences without auto-disbandment.
- Launch Classification & Permission Recovery: Added launch classifier distinguishing fresh installs, updates, and relaunches with a dedicated permission-recovery flow and UI when Accessibility access is missing.
- Onboarding Redesign: Rebuilt onboarding into a 4-step interactive wizard with curated recommended extensions, live sandbox preview, and resilient catalog resolution.
- Reactive Extension Store: Store install/remove now updates instantly with reactive state and immediate remove-button feedback.
- Action Reordering: Corrected reordering in the Actions preferences tab so drag order persists reliably.
- Copied Feedback: Default "Copied" toast now fires for any delivered copy (
.copy/.copyContent/.copyDefinition) when no declared toast wins — previously only paste-context copies triggered it. - Brew Install Docs: Simplified install docs to single-command
brew install --cask ganeshmshetty/tap/openclip.
- Anchored Action Configuration: Replaced the edit sheet with an anchored popover accessed from the gear button or by double-clicking action rows, combining appearance and general settings into an inset-grouped editor with hero icon headers.
- Unified Result Cards & Live Previews: Standardized the result card presentation across all actions and AI tools with live preview support, consistent styling, and customization-resolved action icons.
- Curated Onboarding & Recommendations: Onboarding now recommends curated store extensions (including Quick Translate and Speak Selection) with full catalog resolution, deduplication, and resilient fallback icon rendering.
- Extension Store Cache: Introduced a shared TTL in-memory cache across the Store tab, Onboarding, and background update checks for faster catalog browsing.
- App Rules & Menu Bar Polish: Refined the App Rules tab with enhanced per-app configuration controls; pinned extension management to the top of the menu bar Extensions submenu.
- Post-Onboarding Coach Marks: Added contextual coach mark nudges to guide new users through Accessibility permissions and setup.
- Selection & Cursor Classification: Improved cursor detection to use system-wide cursor state (
NSCursor.currentSystem), ensuring reliable text selection detection across all apps. - Gated Clipboard Fallback: Gated clipboard fallback activation on text insertion cursors (I-beam) and successful paste probes.
- Popup & Toast Interactions: Clicks on the popup shadow ring now dismiss and fall through to background apps; toasts anchor cleanly to the popup frame with fixed shadow clipping.
- Extension Catalog & Validator: Updated catalog with bug fixes across 25 community extensions and aligned the manifest validator to accept payload-free service actions.
- Rich Content & Formatted Text: OpenClip captures and pastes rich text formatted with HTML and RTF, preserving text styles, headings, and links across supported applications.
- Mouse-Hold Trigger: Added a configurable mouse-hold timer in General Preferences, allowing you to summon OpenClip simply by holding down the mouse click without dragging.
- Expanded Calendar Providers: Added support for additional calendar services in event creation extensions.
- Normalized Popup Sizing: Rebalanced proportions and typography across all 5 visual scale levels for crisp rendering on both Retina and standard displays.
- Extension Trust Handling: Fixed an issue where locally modified extensions could trigger unexpected trust warnings during editing.
- Browser Selection Reliability: Resolved edge cases in Safari and Chromium-based browsers to ensure selections are captured instantly without lag.
The initial major release of OpenClip — the fast, native floating action bar for macOS that turns selected text into instant actions.
- Instant Contextual Trigger: Select text in any macOS application, and a floating action bar appears right next to your cursor with relevant actions ready to use.
- Adaptive Positioning: Anchors to where you release the mouse, automatically positioning itself above or below to avoid covering the text you are reading.
- Three Themes: Choose between Glass (macOS Liquid Glass frosted blur), Dark (OLED black contrast), or Light (clean white), fully matching your system appearance.
- Instant Hover Feedback: Seamless buttons with smooth hover animations and pagination for longer action lists.
- Clipboard Fallback: When activated without an active text selection, OpenClip intelligently works with your current clipboard contents.
- Smart Web Search: Instantly search Google, DuckDuckGo, Wikipedia, or your preferred search engine, automatically formatted and encoded.
- Inline Calculator: Highlight mathematical equations (e.g.
45 * 12 + 8%) to calculate answers inline. - Dictionary & Definitions: Look up instant word definitions powered by macOS system dictionaries without opening another app.
- Word Completion & Spelling: Automatic word completion and spelling suggestions for incomplete words.
- Text Transformations: One-click formatting tools including UPPERCASE, lowercase, Title Case, camelCase, JSON Pretty Print, and Trim Whitespace.
- macOS Services & Sharing: Directly access system Share extensions and Services menu items for selected text.
- Global Search Shortcut (Option+Command+C): Open a quick search palette over your entire action library using a customizable hotkey.
- Recent Action Ranking: Quickly find actions with keyboard navigation, ranked by your recent usage.
- Multiple AI Providers: Connect OpenClip to Apple Intelligence, local Ollama models, OpenAI (ChatGPT), or Anthropic (Claude).
- Streaming Live Previews: Watch AI responses stream in real time inside native result cards.
- One-Click Insert & Replace: Paste generated AI results directly over your selected text, copy to clipboard, or expand in the preview card.
- In-App Extension Store: Browse, search, install, and update community extensions with a single click.
- Universal Custom Action Builder: Create custom web searches, text snippets, and scripts without writing code.
- 9,000+ Icon Library: Customize actions using native SF Symbols or search popular icon collections including Lucide, Font Awesome, and Material Symbols.
- Supported Runtimes: Extensions support JavaScript, AppleScript, Shell scripts, URL templates, and macOS Shortcuts.
- Action Reordering: Rearrange actions in Preferences to build your ideal workflow.
- Per-App Rules: Configure OpenClip to behave differently in specific apps — enable auto-paste, restrict to hotkey-only, or disable completely in games and full-screen tools.
- Preferences Interface: Clean settings interface organized into General, Actions, App Rules, AI Services, and Extensions tabs.
- 100% Local & Private: No analytics, no tracking, and no external telemetry.
- Direct Accessibility Integration: Reads selected text directly via macOS Accessibility APIs with zero background battery drain.
- Secure Keychain Storage: API keys and credentials are encrypted securely in the macOS Keychain.
- Subprocess Safety: Scripts run in isolated process groups with automated timeouts to prevent hanging.
- Start at Login: Built-in macOS Login Items integration for seamless system startup.