Maus for vibe coding (Claude, Cursor, Codex)

Vibe coding is half typing, half copy-paste. You bounce between Claude, Cursor, Codex, ChatGPT, your editor, your terminal, and back. Every five minutes you're moving a prompt, a file, an error, or a snippet from one window to another.

The thing nobody says out loud about vibe coding: your clipboard manager just became your prompt library. The prompt you wrote yesterday for refactoring is in there. The system prompt you copied from a Twitter thread is in there. The four files you fed Claude this morning are in there. If you can't find them again, you rewrite them. That's where the productivity bleed happens.

Maus is built for this flow.

The pain (you've felt it)

• You copied a great prompt template last week. It's gone — overwritten by 200 things since.
• You want to paste 4 things into Claude in order: a file, another file, an error, a question. Your clipboard only holds one.
• You saw a useful prompt as a screenshot on Twitter or Discord. Now you have to retype it manually.
• You're chaining Claude → Cursor → terminal. Half your time is finding "the thing I copied two screens ago."
• You don't know if a snippet you want came from Claude, Cursor, or your editor.

1. Pin your most-used prompts

Copy your favorite prompts once. Pin them. They live at the top of Maus forever.

Things worth pinning:

• Refactor templates: "Refactor this function to be pure and testable. Keep behavior identical. Show me the diff."
• Debug patterns: "Walk through this stack trace step by step. Identify the root cause, not the symptom."
• System prompts for specialized agents you've built or copied
• Code review prompts: "Review this PR. Focus on edge cases, race conditions, and missing error handling. Skip style nits."
• Documentation prompts: "Write JSDoc comments for these functions. Keep them under 2 lines each."

On the Free tier, pinned items still live within the rolling 24h history window. On Pro ($12.99 once), pinning is permanent — which is when your clipboard genuinely becomes a prompt library you keep building over months. If you do real vibe coding daily, Pro pays itself back fast.

2. Multipaste: feed Claude or Cursor several files in order

You want Claude to look at auth.ts, session.ts, the failing test, and the error message. Four pastes, in order, into one input.

With Maus: ⌘+Click the four clips in your history, press Enter in the Claude input, they paste in sequence. One operation, four contexts delivered.

3. Autopaste: queue up content as you copy

Double-tap ⌘ to enter listening mode. Now go through your codebase, copy whatever you need: file 1, file 2, the test, the error log. Switch to Claude or Cursor. Press ⌘V. Maus pastes them in the order you copied them.

This is the closest thing to "give Claude my whole context without manually arranging it." You don't have to remember the order — you just copy in sequence and paste once.

4. OCR for screenshots of prompts

Twitter, Discord, Reddit, conference slides — useful prompts often arrive as images. You copy the screenshot, Maus runs OCR automatically, and the text is now in your clipboard history. Searchable. Pasteable. No retyping.

Same trick for screenshots of someone's claude.md or system prompt that they shared in a thread. Capture the image, get the text.

5. Search by source: where did this prompt come from?

Maus tags every clip with the app it came from. You can filter your history:

• claude — only what you copied from Claude (web, desktop, or Cursor)
• cursor — only Cursor IDE clips
• gpt or chatgpt — only ChatGPT
• codex — only the Codex app
• terminal — only command output

Combine with type filters: #code claude finds only code you copied from Claude. #url gpt finds links from ChatGPT. Two tokens, exact result.

6. The cursor-anchored window across AI tools

You're probably running Claude Desktop on one monitor, Cursor on another, ChatGPT in a browser tab, and a terminal somewhere. Maus opens at your cursor on whichever window you're focused on. No mouse trip to the menubar of the main display.

Hit ⌘⇧V, search, paste, gone. The whole interaction is under a second.

What Maus is not

• Not a prompt manager with variables. Maus is clipboard pinning, not {{template}} substitution. If you need variable interpolation, use a dedicated tool.
• Not a Claude/Cursor extension. Maus is a system-level clipboard manager — it works between apps, not inside one.
• Not synced across devices. Everything stays on your Mac. No cloud, no account.

Privacy: your prompts and your code stay local

Maus is 100% local. Your clipboard never leaves your machine. The proprietary code you paste into Cursor, the API keys in your terminal output, the half-finished prompt you'll never publish — none of it touches a server. No telemetry of clipboard content, no account, no sync.

For people working with sensitive code or experimenting with prompts they're not ready to share, this matters more than it does for a general-purpose user.