🦀 clawpypaste

A macOS menu bar app that surfaces grabbable blocks from your active Claude Code session — fenced code, tool output, file paths, URLs, whole messages, markdown, tables — so you can click to copy instead of mouse-selecting across wrapped lines in your terminal.

Reads the session JSONL Claude Code already writes to disk. No accessibility prompts for the basic features, no terminal scraping, no plugins.

Install

macOS 13 (Ventura) or newer. Notarized & signed with Developer ID — no Gatekeeper warnings.

Homebrew (recommended)

brew install --cask krisbradley/tap/clawpypaste
open /Applications/clawpypaste.app

The cask installs clawpypaste.app into /Applications and symlinks the binary as /opt/homebrew/bin/clawpypaste (or /usr/local/bin/clawpypaste on Intel) so you can use the CLI from any shell.

Direct download

Grab the notarized clawpypaste.zip from the latest release, unzip, drag clawpypaste.app into /Applications, double-click.

From source

Requires the Swift toolchain (xcode-select --install is enough).

git clone https://github.com/krisbradley/clawpypaste.git
cd clawpypaste
make install

This builds + signs + installs to /Applications/clawpypaste.app and symlinks clawpypaste onto your PATH.

Launch at login

After installing by any of the methods above:

clawpypaste --enable-login

Or right-click the menu bar 🦀 → Launch at login.

Usage

Action	How
Open the popover	Click the 🦀 in the menu bar, or press ⌃⌥V
Move selection	↑ / ↓ (Shift+arrow jumps by 10)
Copy selected block	Return (popover auto-dismisses)
Focus search field	/
Drag a block to another app	Click-and-hold, then drag
Pin / unpin	Click the star, or right-click → Pin
Switch session	Click the session name in the header
Browse history across sessions	Session menu → All sessions (history)
Open detached window	Right-click 🦀 → "Open window"
Quit	Right-click 🦀 → "Quit"

Right-click any block for…

• Edit and copy… — open the content in a TextEditor sheet; edit then copy
• Fill in values… — when the block contains {{placeholder}} tokens, opens a labeled form to substitute values before copying
• Copy without markdown — strips **bold**, *italic*, `code`, headings, lists, blockquotes, link syntax (great for Slack DMs)
• Copy as pretty JSON — when the block parses as JSON
• Wrap as code fence — wrap a non-code block as ```lang for posting elsewhere
• Copy as Markdown / TSV (Slack) / CSV — on detected markdown tables
• Copy humanized — on prose blocks with AI-typical punctuation or phrases (strips em-dashes, smart quotes, "Certainly!", "I hope this helps!", etc.)
• Inject into Claude prompt — pastes the block into whatever app was focused before the popover opened (requires Accessibility permission on first use)
• Pin / Unpin

CLI

The same binary doubles as a CLI for shell scripts:

clawpypaste last [kind]      # print the most recent block (optionally of a kind) to stdout
clawpypaste search <query>   # list blocks containing the query
clawpypaste paste <id>       # copy a specific block to the clipboard
clawpypaste list [kind]      # list all blocks (id, kind, lines, preview)
clawpypaste kinds            # list valid kind names
clawpypaste --enable-login   # register as a Login Item

Example: vim "$(clawpypaste last code > /tmp/snippet && echo /tmp/snippet)" — drop the most recent code block into a file and open it.

Block kinds

Kind	Source	Default copy	Special copy-as
Code	Fenced code in assistant text, Write/Edit content for non-prose files, Bash commands	Raw text	—
Markdown	```md fences, Write/Edit to .md/.txt/README	Raw markdown	Humanized (if AI punct)
Table	Pipe-delimited tables	Raw markdown	Markdown / TSV (Slack) / CSV
Tool output	Result of any tool call	Raw text	Pretty JSON (if applicable)
Tool input	Other tool inputs (queries, prompts)	Raw text	—
Path	File paths in prose (/Users/...)	Raw path	—
URL	http(s) URLs in prose	Raw URL	—
Message	Whole assistant message	Raw markdown	Humanized (if AI punct)
Section	Markdown section under a heading	Raw markdown	—

How it works

Claude Code writes every session to a JSONL file under ~/.claude/projects/<encoded-project-dir>/<uuid>.jsonl. Each line is a typed record: a user message, an assistant message with content blocks (text / thinking / tool_use), a tool result, or metadata like custom-title / agent-color.

clawpypaste:

1. Finds the active session — newest mtime under ~/.claude/projects/ (or whichever you switched to via the session menu)
2. Watches the file with a DispatchSource for incremental writes
3. Re-parses on change (debounced 150ms) into typed SessionRecords
4. Extracts blocks by walking each record: code fences, markdown tables, file paths and URLs in prose, markdown sections, tool inputs/outputs, whole assistant messages
5. Dedupes by content hash so the same block doesn't appear twice
6. Renders in SwiftUI inside an NSPopover, with syntax highlighting for code and inline-markdown rendering for prose

History mode lazily extends the same pipeline across every JSONL under ~/.claude/projects/, caching per file by mtime so reopens are cheap.

The Carbon RegisterEventHotKey API powers the global ⌃⌥V hotkey. SMAppService.mainApp powers Launch at Login. CGEvent powers the "Inject into Claude prompt" paste (the only feature that requires Accessibility permission).

Development

make run             # swift run (no .app bundle, no signing)
make build           # build signed .app bundle
make install         # build + drop in /Applications + symlink CLI + launch
make clean           # remove build artifacts
make uninstall       # remove installed app + disable login item + remove CLI symlink

# debug parsing without the GUI
clawpypaste dump

Releases are cut by ./release.sh (builds, signs with Developer ID, notarizes, staples, zips).

License

MIT. See LICENSE.