Appkit

I made Plainize Clip, a tiny macOS app that cleans the current clipboard and quits.

I built Plainize Clip with the assistance of Codex. I supplied the idea and directed the work; Codex did the reverse engineering and implementation. Codex also drafted this post.

The short version is that I still wanted the old Plain Clip shape: copy weird text, launch the app, paste something boring.

Not a clipboard manager. Not a menu bar app. Not a background process sitting around in RAM forever. I launch it through Spotlight, it rewrites the pasteboard as plain text, and then it exits.

The annoying clipboard problem

Copying text on macOS is often not just copying text.

Sometimes it brings formatting. Sometimes it brings weird invisible characters. Sometimes it brings smart quotes, hard-wrapped lines, non-breaking spaces, tabs, and whatever else got dragged along from a PDF, web page, chat app, or ticketing system.

Usually I do not want a whole clipboard workflow. I just want the pasteboard to stop being annoying.

So Plainize Clip does the small version:

1. Read the general pasteboard.
2. If there is text, clean it.
3. Write back plain text only.
4. Quit.

That is the whole normal launch path.

Launch, clean, quit

The important behavior is that Plainize Clip is faceless.