A clipboard, lit.

A native, Liquid-Glass macOS clipboard manager that lives in your menu bar, backs up to iCloud, and stays out of your way until you need it.

Install · Features · Build from source · Architecture · Roadmap · Contributing

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Why Lume

Most clipboard managers are utilities. Lume is a product. It is built from day one for macOS 26 Tahoe and uses Apple's Liquid Glass material exclusively, so it looks and feels native — not like a window glued onto your menu bar.

• One click opens a glass popover with your full history and a search field. No delay.
• Right-click the menu-bar glyph for Open Lume… and Settings….
• iCloud-backed by default. Your clipboard syncs across every Mac you own, end-to-end-encrypted for sensitive entries.
• Superfast. Cold launch under 120 ms, popover refresh under one frame, full-text search at 100k+ rows under 16 ms — enforced by tests in CI.
• Open source. MIT licensed. No telemetry.

Features

Capture

Text + RTF + HTML	Always on. Plain text + the formatted blob alongside, so you can paste back with formatting if you want.
Colors	Hex codes (#7A70FF) and color-picker output (NSColor) auto-detect into a Color clip.
File paths	Always on, but stores only the path — no file body, so it costs nothing. Stale paths are flagged in the row and pasting falls back to plain text if the file moved.
Images	Opt-in (Settings → Data → Images). Off by default to keep the database lean. When on, screenshots and copied images land with a 200×200 JPEG thumbnail for fast lists.
Excluded apps	Tell Lume to never read the clipboard while certain apps are frontmost.
Sensitive content	Heuristically detected secrets are sealed with ChaCha20-Poly1305 before they ever touch disk or iCloud. The key lives in iCloud Keychain (E2E by Apple).

Find

FTS5 search	SQLite full-text search. Instant even at 100k rows.
Smart filters	URLs, Emails, Today, This Week — sidebar entries computed via NSDataDetector at filter time.
Type filters	Files, Colors, Images (when capture is on).
Pinned	Star anything to keep it forever. Pinned clips survive auto-purge.
Per-app filtering	Source app and bundle id are searchable.

Act

Quick paste	Click a row in the popover, ⌘1–9 in the popover, or double-click in the main window.
Smart actions in detail	Open URL, Email …, Reveal in Finder — surfaced when the clip's content matches.
Quick transforms	One-click lowercase / uppercase / trim / JSON pretty-print / base64 ↔ / URL encode-decode. The transformed result is copied and added back to history.
Edit mode	Inline TextEditor to fix typos, then Save & Copy without mutating the original.
Plain-text paste	Strip formatting from any rich-text clip via context menu.
Snippets	Saved boilerplate with variables: {{date}} {{time}} {{datetime}} {{clipboard}}. Insert from a menu in the popover footer or the Snippets tab.
Tags	Manage colored tags in Settings → Tags. Apply/remove from the detail pane.
Global hotkey	Default ⌥⌘V to summon the popover from anywhere. Customisable in Settings → Hot Keys via a click-to-record field.

Live with it

Per-kind auto-purge	Independent retention windows for text/colors (default 30 d), images (7 d), files (14 d). Pinned clips never purge.
iCloud sync	Backup and sync via your private CloudKit container. Lume has no servers. Disabled gracefully when there's no iCloud entitlement.
Bulk maintenance	Settings → Data → Compact database (VACUUM) and Clear all unpinned with a confirmation alert.
Stats	Per-day capture chart for the last 30 days (Swift Charts), top apps with their icons, top kinds, storage used.
Onboarding	Seven-step welcome on first launch — Welcome, Capture, Find, Tags, Snippets, Hot key, Done. Each step shows a glass demo card.
Custom accent	Settings → General → Appearance. Picks any color; propagates to every surface (popover, main window, onboarding, charts) instantly.
Popover style	Default or Minimal layouts in Settings → General.
Native macOS	NSStatusItem, NSSearchField, List(selection:), Form — built with the system's components, not custom skins.

Install

Lume is distributed as an unsigned .dmg and .zip from GitHub Releases. It is not on the Mac App Store and is not signed with a Developer ID — this is an intentional choice to keep the project free, open, and frictionless to ship.

The first launch needs one of these two steps to satisfy Gatekeeper:

# Option A — strip the quarantine flag
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Lume.app

Option B — right-click the app, choose "Open", then click "Open" in the
warning dialog. After the first launch, double-click works normally.

System requirements:

• macOS 26 Tahoe or later
• Apple silicon (Universal binary planned)

Build from source

git clone https://github.com/k6w/lume.git
cd lume
brew install xcodegen
./scripts/run.sh           # builds + launches

The convenience script:

./scripts/run.sh           # build + launch (default)
./scripts/run.sh build     # just build
./scripts/run.sh test      # run the unit tests
./scripts/run.sh bench     # run perf benchmarks
./scripts/run.sh kill      # stop a running Lume
./scripts/run.sh regen     # regenerate Lume.xcodeproj from project.yml

GRDB is the only runtime dependency. Open Lume/Lume.xcodeproj in Xcode 26 if you prefer the IDE. Configurations check in:

• Local debug — entitlements stripped of iCloud / APS so you don't need an Apple Developer team. iCloud sync is auto-disabled at runtime when the entitlement is missing.
• Release — uses the full Lume.entitlements (CloudKit, APS, Keychain group). You'd need a paid Apple Developer team to ship signed builds, but the unsigned local build is fully usable.

To cut a release artifact:

./scripts/release.sh 0.1.0

Produces dist/Lume-0.1.0.zip, dist/Lume-0.1.0.dmg, and a matching SHA256SUMS.

Privacy

Lume reads NSPasteboard.general whenever it changes, on a 0.4 s timer. Nothing leaves your machine unless iCloud Sync is enabled, in which case the only network destination is your own private CloudKit database. Lume has no telemetry, no analytics, and no remote config.

You can exclude any app from monitoring under Settings → Privacy.

Roadmap

Version	Focus
v0.1 (shipped)	Menu bar + popover, capture, dedup, search, auto-purge, iCloud sync wiring, onboarding, custom branding.
v0.2 (in progress)	Smart filters (URLs/Emails/dates), quick transforms, tags, snippet variables, per-kind retention, file staleness, edit mode, charts, bulk ops, capture toast.
v0.3	Format rules engine (regex → action), Shortcuts.app actions, URL schemes, CLI companion, a11y audit.
v0.4	Sync polish (conflict UI, pause-on-battery), iPhone / iPad companion.
v1.0	Quick-paste palette overlay, localization (de/fr/es/ja).

The full plan with effort sizing lives in docs/ROADMAP.md.

License

MIT — do whatever you want, just keep the notice.