← Clipnest

Privacy

Your clipboard is some of the most sensitive data on your machine — passwords, tokens, private messages. Clipnest treats it that way.

100% local, with one narrow exception

Nothing you copy, paste, or save as a snippet is ever sent anywhere — no servers, no sync, no analytics, no telemetry, no account.

The only network traffic Clipnest ever makes is a background check against GitHub’s public Releases API, once a day, to see whether a newer version exists. You can turn it off in Settings → General. That check sends nothing about you or your clipboard — just an anonymous request for the latest release tag — and nothing downloads or installs automatically because of it; updating stays a separate step you choose to run yourself (on Linux, after you confirm Install Update…). See Update on Mac and Update and uninstall on Linux for those flows.

Your history and snippets are stored only on your own disk: on the Mac in ~/Library/Application Support/Clipnest, on Linux in ~/.local/share/Clipnest (or $XDG_DATA_HOME/Clipnest if you set that).

On-device OCR: opt-in, and a real trade-off — stated plainly

Turn on “Recognize text in copied images” (Settings → History, off by default) and Clipnest reads the text in a screenshot right on your computer — with Apple’s Vision framework on the Mac, or on Linux with the ONNX Runtime and PP-OCRv5 models installed by the clipnest-ocr packages — no upload, no model download, no network call of any kind.

But that recognized text becomes plain, searchable text stored alongside the image. So a screenshot of a password, a token, or anything else sensitive turns that content into indexed text on disk. That’s exactly why this is off by default — turn it on only if you’re fine with that trade-off.

It never runs on anything the pasteboard-privacy checks below already rejected: concealed/transient (password-manager) copies and content from excluded apps are filtered out before an item is even captured, so on-device text recognition never sees them either. See Features for the Mac’s Fast/Accurate quality setting.

Password managers are ignored

Clipnest honors the standard “concealed” and “transient” clipboard markers that password managers set, so copies from 1Password, Bitwarden, and similar apps are never stored. No setting can override this.

On Linux the equivalent marker is x-kde-passwordManagerHint (set by KeePassXC and others). Those copies are never stored either, including the copy GNOME re-publishes after the password manager clears the clipboard.

Linux permissions, and what they can see

Auto-paste on Linux needs one permission: it adds you to a dedicated clipnest-input group that can create a virtual keyboard and nothing else. It is deliberately not the input group, which could read your keystrokes. Without it, Clipnest still works; it copies your choice and you press Ctrl+V yourself. The optional GNOME Shell extension only changes where the picker window opens.

No clipboard content in logs

Only metadata — things like an item’s id or a failure’s error case — is ever logged. Clipboard or snippet content is never written to a log.

You’re in control

Delete any entry on the spot, pause capture whenever you want, and clear your entire history in one click — all from Settings.