Trove
Things get lost along the way
This morning’s link, yesterday’s invoice number, a colour from the mock-up — everything you copied is in Trove, grouped and dated.
Clipboard manager for macOS
Everything you copy, one shortcut away.
Trove remembers the text, links, images, files and code that pass through your Mac’s clipboard. Press ⌘Space, type a couple of letters and paste — and the history never leaves your computer.
Version 1.8 · Apple Silicon · signed and notarised · MIT licence
Your clipboard remembers one thing. You need more.
macOS keeps only the last thing you copied. One ⌘C too many and that address, contract clause or terminal command is gone.
Your data isn’t the product
The history, its index and its files live in a local SQLite database on your disk. No account, no sync, no telemetry.
Fast, even years later
History is unlimited, and a typical search across a million entries takes a few milliseconds. There’s nothing to tidy up.
Features
One window for everything you copy
The Trove palette opens over whatever app you’re working in. Pick a category, search and paste — all from the keyboard.
Clipboard history
Every kind of content, previewed
- Text, links, images, files, colours, code and HTML — each with a preview that suits it.
- Copy the same thing several times and you get one row with a ×N badge and the list of times.
- Enter pastes straight into the window you came from; ⌘⇧V pastes it as plain text.
- Pinned entries stay for good, even with history clean-up switched on.
Search
Finds “wrzesień” when you type “wrzesien”
Full-text search ignores diacritics — including Polish letters like “ł” — so you can type however is quickest and still land on the right entry before you finish the word.
A type filter narrows the list to just links, images or files.
Applications
A launcher that gets your shorthand
Category 1 lists every installed app, with its icon. “vsc” finds Visual Studio Code, “chrm” finds Chrome. An app you’ve just installed shows up without a restart.
Windows
Window snapping, Rectangle-style
Halves, quarters, maximise and centre — from the palette or with global shortcuts such as ⌘⌥←. Trove moves the window you were last working in, even if you opened the palette from the menu bar.
Chat
An AI model in a window of its own
Talk to a model from Anthropic, OpenAI, OpenRouter or Z.ai using your own API key. Answers stream in as they’re written, with Markdown, tables and code blocks. The conversation lives only in the window’s memory.
Open it with 5 or ⌘K from the palette.
Import
Bring your history from Raycast or SuperCmd
Trove imports Raycast’s encrypted .rayconfig export as well as JSON and CSV files from Raycast and SuperCmd. The import runs entirely on your Mac, and running it twice creates no duplicates.
Key vault
Category 3 lists the key names in your personal vault. The value goes straight to the clipboard and is never saved in the history.
Retention on your terms
History is unlimited by default. You can have Trove delete entries older than N days — pinned ones stay.
Lives in the menu bar
No Dock icon and no ⌘Tab entry unless you turn it on. The menu bar is also where you pause capture.
Export and statistics
Export the whole history to a folder, and see in settings how much space the database and files take up.
Privacy
By default: no network traffic at all
Clipboard content, queries and paths never reach the logs. Password managers mark their entries as concealed — Trove skips them before reading anything. You can also exclude any app you like.
The network comes into play in just three features, each of which you switch on yourself:
| Feature | What it sends, and where | How to turn it off |
|---|---|---|
| Link previews | Fetches the title, icon and image of a page you copied a link to. Ports 80 and 443 only, never local or private-network addresses. | Settings → Links |
| Chat | The messages in the conversation — only to the provider you picked, with your key. | Simply don’t open the chat |
| Key vault | A request to your own vault, and only once you enter that category. | Sends nothing unless configured |
How it works
Four steps, no set-up
-
Install
Download the DMG from GitHub Releases and drag Trove to Applications. Its icon appears in the menu bar.
-
Copy as usual
Trove quietly saves everything that reaches the clipboard — except excluded apps and password-manager entries.
-
Summon the palette
⌘Space opens the palette over the current window. Keys 1–5 pick a category; just typing searches the history.
-
Paste
Enter pastes the entry into the window you were in. The first time, macOS asks for the Accessibility permission.
⌘Space belongs to Spotlight out of the box. Trove spots the clash and offers a button in settings that frees the shortcut — or hands it back to Spotlight. You can also pick any other combination.
A million entries, still milliseconds
Measured on 23 August 2026 on a synthetic history of one million records (Apple Silicon, using the trove-bench tool in the repository).
- Search (p95)
- 3.2 ms
- First page of results
- 2.8 ms
- 400th page of the list
- 3.4 ms
- App memory
- 131 MB
To be fair: a query for a word that appears in much of the history takes hundreds of milliseconds (811 ms p95 for 600,000 matches), because every match has to be scored. Memory was measured on a debug build.
Gallery
Screenshots
The real Trove interface, on made-up data. Click to enlarge; the arrow keys move between shots.
For developers
Rust, Tauri 2 and React
A Rust core (a workspace of over a dozen crates), a Tauri 2 shell and a React 19 interface in TypeScript. Data lives in SQLite in WAL mode, with an FTS5 index and a content-addressed file store.
Stack
- Rust 1.96
- Tauri 2
- SQLite · FTS5
- React 19
- TypeScript
- Vite
- Vitest
- pnpm 10
- Node 22
Running it locally
You’ll need macOS with the Xcode Command Line Tools, Rust 1.96 (pinned in rust-toolchain.toml), Node 22 and pnpm 10.33. No environment variables are required.
pnpm install
# the interface in a browser, on synthetic data
pnpm dev
# the native app, with its own development database
TROVE_DATA_DIR="data/dev" pnpm tauri devQuality gates
cargo fmt --all --check
cargo clippy --workspace --all-targets --locked -- -D warnings
cargo test --workspace --locked
pnpm typecheck && pnpm test -- --run && pnpm buildRepository layout
apps/desktop-uiinterface: React + TypeScript + Vitecrates/trove-coreentities, canonicalisation, hashingcrates/trove-storeSQLite, migrations, CAS, writercrates/trove-searchPolish normalisation, FTS5, rankingcrates/trove-importRaycast and SuperCmd parserscrates/trove-launcherapp catalogue and launchingcrates/trove-link-previewguarded preview fetchingsrc-taurilifecycle, IPC, permissionstools/trove-import-cliimport and verification from the terminaltools/trove-benchsynthetic history and measurements
Importing from the terminal
cargo run -p trove-import-cli -- analyze --source <directory-or-file>
cargo run -p trove-import-cli -- import --source <…> --data-dir data/devWindows and Linux adapters exist in the code but have not yet been compiled or run on those systems — for now, Trove is a macOS app.