A clipboard manager for Mac developers

Three monitors. IDE on the left, terminal on the right, browser and Slack on top. You copy a stack trace from the terminal. Where does your clipboard manager open? In the menubar of the main monitor — half a screen-width away.

That tiny mouse trip happens dozens of times a day. It's not a productivity disaster, but it's friction you don't need. Maus opens where your cursor already is, on whichever monitor you're working on. That's the headline, but it's not the only thing built for the way devs actually code.

What a dev's clipboard actually looks like

If you're a developer on macOS, your clipboard sees something like this every hour:

• A stack trace from the terminal — needs to land in your IDE
• A query result — needs to go into a Notion doc
• A SQL snippet from a teammate's Slack — needs to run in psql
• A URL from the browser — needs to become a curl argument
• Three imports you're moving from one file to another
• A screenshot of an error somebody DM'd you
• A regex you wrote 20 minutes ago and now want again

None of this is exotic. It's the daily flow. The macOS clipboard remembers exactly the last one. Maus remembers all of them and gets them back to you fast.

Use cases that matter when you're shipping code

1. Multi-monitor without the menubar trip

Cursor-anchored window. Press ⌘⇧V on monitor 3 and Maus opens there. No mouse travel to the menubar of the primary display. If you've worked on a 3-monitor setup, you know exactly how much friction this saves.

2. OCR on error screenshots

A teammate pastes a screenshot of an error in Slack. You copy the image, Maus runs OCR automatically and stores the recognized text alongside the image. Now you can search for "Cannot read property" in your clipboard history and paste the actual string into your terminal — without retyping anything.

This works for screenshots from Discord, Twitter, Reddit, and your own ⌃⌘⇧4 selections too. Anywhere you'd normally squint at an image and retype the error, Maus already has the text.

3. Search by source app

Maus tags every clip with where it came from. You can search by source:

• chrome — only what you copied from the browser
• terminal or iterm — only command output
• cursor, code, xcode — only what's been in your IDE
• slack, discord — only chat messages

Combine with type filters (#url, #image, #code) to pinpoint what you need: "the terminal output I copied 30 minutes ago" becomes a 2-character search.

4. Multipaste for moving code blocks

You're cleaning up a file and need to move 3 imports plus 2 helper functions to a new module. ⌘+Click them all in your Maus history, hit Enter in the new file, they paste in order. No tab-switching, no temp file, no losing your place.

5. Pin commands and snippets you reuse

Pin your curl templates with auth headers, your common kubectl incantations, the SQL EXPLAIN ANALYZE wrapper you keep rewriting. Pinned clips surface at the top of your history.

This isn't a snippet manager (Maus doesn't try to be Alfred snippets or TextExpander). It's just clipboard pinning — copy it once, pin it. On the Free tier pinned items stay within the rolling 24h window. On Pro they stay forever, which is when pinning becomes a real reusable library.

6. Autopaste for chained commands

Filling out a deploy checklist that needs four values pasted in order across four input fields? Double-tap ⌘ to enter listening mode, copy the four values, then ⌘V in each field — Maus pastes the next one automatically. Originally built for forms, weirdly useful for CI/CD inputs.

7. Capture code from screenshots and conference talks

A KubeCon talk shows a code snippet on stage. Screenshot it, copy the image, Maus OCRs it. The text is now in your clipboard history, ready to paste into your editor. Same for Twitter screenshots, conference recordings, design mocks with code in them.

"An unexpected productivity hack." — r/macapps user

What it doesn't try to be

Honest about scope:

• Not a snippet manager. If you want templated snippets with variables, use Alfred or TextExpander. Maus does pinned clips, that's it.
• Not a sync tool. Clipboard stays on your Mac. If you need iCloud sync to your iPhone, use Paste.
• Not open source. If that's a hard requirement, Maccy is the right call.

The privacy angle (matters for devs especially)

Maus is 100% local. No cloud, no account, no telemetry of clipboard content. Your API keys, secrets, internal URLs, customer data — none of it leaves your Mac. When 1Password or Bitwarden mark a clip as sensitive, Maus respects the macOS concealed flag and won't store it.

Native Swift, no Electron, runs natively on Apple Silicon. The whole app is under 4 MB.