ClipManager

A fast, native Windows clipboard manager built in C++/Win32. No Electron, no .NET runtime — just a lightweight tray app.

Features

• Clipboard history — automatically tracks everything you copy: text, images, files/folders
• Smart detection — auto-tags URLs, hex colors, file paths, and emails with one-click quick actions (open in browser, open in Explorer, copy hex)
• Image support — captures screenshots and copied images with thumbnail previews, auto-cleans orphaned files
• File & folder support — copy files in Explorer, paste the real file back later — not just the path
• Snippets — save reusable text (signatures, commands, templates) in a dedicated tab, separate from clipboard history
• Global hotkey — Ctrl+Shift+V opens a searchable two-panel popup near your cursor
• Pin favorites — keep important clips at the top forever
• Privacy controls — exclude password managers, pause monitoring, clear on exit
• Auto-delete — clean up clips older than N days
• First-run wizard — quick 3-step setup on first launch
• System tray — runs quietly in the background, starts with Windows

Install

Download the latest ClipManager_Setup.exe from Releases and run it. The installer adds a Start Menu entry, desktop shortcut, and registers ClipManager to launch at login.

Build from source

Requirements: Visual Studio 2022+ (Desktop C++ workload), CMake 3.20+

cmake -B build -G "Visual Studio 17 2022" -A x64
cmake --build build --config Release

Binary will be at build\Release\ClipManager.exe.

Usage

Action	Shortcut
Open clipboard history	Ctrl + Shift + V
Paste selected clip	Enter
Pin / unpin clip	Ctrl + P
Remove clip	Ctrl + Del
Add New Snippet	Ctrl + N
Close popup	Esc

Right-click the tray icon for Settings, manual history view, or to exit.

🏗️ Architectural Overview

Unlike older clipboard utilities that rely on fragile hooks or the outdated SetClipboardViewer chain, ClipManager is built from the ground up to be safe, event-driven, and highly performant.

Core Architecture Components

• Application Core (src/core/): Handles the app lifecycle, single-instance execution via a system Mutex, and a global-state-free Win32 message loop utilizing GWLP_USERDATA routing.
• Clipboard Monitor (src/components/clipboard.cpp): Implements the modern AddClipboardFormatListener API for crash-resilient, system-friendly tracking of WM_CLIPBOARDUPDATE messages.
• UI System (src/ui/): Manages double-buffered window painting, custom tray notification icons, and advanced cursor-tracked popups optimized via WM_ACTIVATE to prevent focus-stealing.
• Async Storage & GDI+ Imaging (src/components/storage.cpp, src/components/imaging.cpp): Offloads intensive disk write operations and GDI+ screenshot/thumbnail parsing to a background worker thread to prevent interface micro-stutters.

Project File Structure

ClipManager/
├── CMakeLists.txt              # Core build configuration
├── README.md                   # Project documentation
├── .gitignore                  # Build and IDE exclusions
├── installer/
│   └── installer.nsi           # NSIS deployment installer script
├── resources/
│   ├── icon.ico                # Application tray & window icon
│   └── resource.rc             # Windows resource file (version info + icon)
└── src/
    ├── common.h                # Shared definitions, macros, structural contracts
    ├── main.cpp                # App entry point & message dispatching
    ├── clipboard.h / .cpp      # Advanced clipboard monitoring & format extraction
    ├── tray.h / .cpp           # Shell_NotifyIcon & tray context menu implementation
    ├── popup.h / .cpp          # Owner-drawn 2-panel interface, rendering loops & WndProc
    ├── settings.h / .cpp       # 5-tab configuration panel layout & state tracking
    ├── storage.h / .cpp        # Backward-compatible pipe-delimited database engine
    ├── detector.h / .cpp       # Regex smart-content classification engine
    ├── imaging.h / .cpp        # GDI+ snapshot capture, thumbnail generation & orphan cleanup
    ├── snippets.h / .cpp       # Dynamic snippet repository and string expansion mapping
    └── wizard.h / .cpp         # First-run PerMonitorV2 DPI-aware setup wizard

Uses AddClipboardFormatListener (Vista+) rather than the legacy SetClipboardViewer chain, avoiding the classic "one app crashes, clipboard breaks for everyone" bug.

File/folder clips use CF_HDROP so pasted items are real files, not just text paths. Images are stored as PNGs in %APPDATA%\ClipManager\images\, with automatic orphan cleanup on startup and whenever history is trimmed or cleared.

Data storage

• History: %APPDATA%\ClipManager\history.txt
• Snippets: %APPDATA%\ClipManager\snippets.txt
• Images: %APPDATA%\ClipManager\images\

Uninstalling removes all of the above.

License

MIT