Clipboard History

Lightweight clipboard history manager for Windows. Lives in the system tray, silently records everything you copy, and lets you paste any previous entry with a single click.

Features

• Global hotkey — Ctrl+Shift+V opens the popup from anywhere (works on any keyboard layout)
• Text & images — captures both text and image clipboard content (screenshots, copied images)
• Image preview — hover over an image entry to see a larger preview
• Search — filter history by typing in the search bar
• Pin — pin important entries so they stay at the top
• Click to paste — select any entry and it gets pasted into the previously active window
• Keyboard navigation — Up/Down to move, Enter to paste, Escape to close
• System tray — runs quietly in the background with a tray icon menu
• Auto-start — optionally start with Windows (toggle from tray menu)
• Single instance — prevents duplicate processes via Windows Mutex
• Deduplication — consecutive identical copies are stored only once
• SQLite storage — up to 500 entries with automatic cleanup of oldest unpinned items

Installation

pip install -r requirements.txt

Dependencies

• customtkinter — modern UI
• pywin32 — clipboard access
• pystray — system tray icon
• Pillow — image processing

Usage

# Normal use (no console window)
pythonw main.pyw

# Debug mode (with console output)
python main.pyw

The app appears in the system tray. Copy text or images as usual — they are saved automatically.

Press Ctrl+Shift+V to open the history popup, then click any item to paste it.

How It Works

Component	Role
main.pyw	Entry point, orchestrates all modules
app/clipboard_monitor.py	Listens for clipboard changes via Win32 AddClipboardFormatListener
app/hotkey_manager.py	Registers global Ctrl+Shift+V via Win32 RegisterHotKey (layout-independent)
app/popup_window.py	CustomTkinter popup with search, pin, delete, image preview
app/paste_engine.py	Sets clipboard content and simulates Ctrl+V in the target window
app/database.py	SQLite CRUD with thread-safe locking, image BLOB storage
app/tray_icon.py	System tray icon and menu via pystray
app/autostart.py	Windows registry auto-start management
app/config.py	All constants and paths

Requirements

• Windows 10 / 11
• Python 3.8+