Past — a privacy-first clipboard manager for Windows

A fast, local-only clipboard manager for Windows. Press a global hotkey, get a horizontal strip of your recent clips, filter as you type, and press Enter to paste straight back into the app you came from.

Free software. No account, no cloud, no telemetry, no pricing. Your clipboard history never leaves your machine — the app ships with no networking code at all.

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Credit where it's due

This project is inspired, end to end, by PasteClip — a privacy-first clipboard manager for macOS (source). The product thinking is theirs: local-first storage, keyboard-driven recall, explicit capture controls, bounded retention, and a card-based visual history. All kudos to PasteClip and its author for the original design and for showing that a clipboard manager can be genuinely privacy-respecting.

Past is not a port and shares no code with PasteClip. macOS's APIs have no counterpart here, so everything was rebuilt natively against Windows:

PasteClip (macOS)	Past (Windows)
NSPasteboard + changeCount polling	AddClipboardFormatListener + WM_CLIPBOARDUPDATE (event-driven)
Carbon / NSEvent global hotkey	RegisterHotKey on a message-only window
CGEvent paste	SetClipboardData + SendInput
Keychain / FileVault	DPAPI-wrapped key + AES-256-GCM
AppKit	WinUI 3 (Windows App SDK)
iCloud sync	(intentionally dropped — local only)

If you're on a Mac, go use PasteClip.

Features (v1)

• Text and image capture — event-driven, no polling
• Horizontal card strip — each clip is a card with type badge (TEXT / LINK / CODE / IMAGE), source app, relative age and size. Images show a thumbnail; ones over 50 MB show a generic icon instead but still paste.
• Global hotkey — tries Win+Alt+V first (Windows reserves Win+V, and Win+Shift+V is taken on some machines), falling back through other chords until one registers
• Instant search — just start typing
• Paste on select (default on) — pick a clip and it lands in your app immediately. Turn it off in the tray menu to only put it on the clipboard and paste it yourself.
• Encrypted at rest — SQLite store with AES-256-GCM; the key is wrapped with Windows DPAPI, so the database is unreadable on another machine or user account
• Tray controls — pause capture, clear history, quit

Privacy

• Everything is stored locally in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Past\
• Clip contents are encrypted at rest and never written to logs
• The local diagnostic log holds metadata only, and nothing is ever sent anywhere
• settings.json is deliberately plain text: they're non-sensitive toggles, and being able to read exactly what's stored suits a privacy-first tool

Install

Grab PastSetup.exe from the latest release and run it. It installs per-user, so there is no admin prompt, and it adds a Start menu entry, an optional "start when I sign in" task, and a normal uninstall entry under "Apps & features".

The installer is not code-signed, so SmartScreen may warn on first run — choose More info → Run anyway.

Prefer not to install anything? Past-x64.zip from the same release is the raw build: extract it anywhere and run Past.App.exe. Both are self-contained, so no .NET install is needed.

Uninstalling leaves your clipboard history in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Past alone; delete that folder too if you want it gone.

Requirements

• Windows 10 21H2+ / Windows 11 (x64)

Building

The engine and tests build with the plain .NET SDK:

dotnet test tests/Past.Tests/Past.Tests.csproj

The WinUI 3 app must be built with Visual Studio's MSBuild, not dotnet build — the PRI/Appx task ships with VS, not the .NET SDK. Install VS 2022/2026 with the .NET desktop development workload plus the .NET WinUI app development tools component, then:

& "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\18\Community\MSBuild\Current\Bin\MSBuild.exe" `
    src\Past.App\Past.App.csproj -restore -p:Configuration=Debug -p:Platform=x64

Full details in docs/06-BUILD-WINUI.md.

Building the installer

Needs Inno Setup 6. After a Release build:

ISCC.exe installer\Past.iss /DAppVersion=0.2.0
# -> dist\PastSetup.exe

CI does this automatically and attaches it to releases built from a v* tag.

Project layout

src/Past.Core            domain model (Clip, hashing) — no platform dependencies
src/Past.Services        history logic (dedupe, caps, search), settings, interfaces
src/Past.Infrastructure  SQLite store, DPAPI/AES crypto, Win32 interop
src/Past.App             WinUI 3 tray app + overlay
tests/Past.Tests         unit tests

Design docs — product definition, high-level design, roadmap — live in docs/.

Not planned

Cloud sync, accounts, telemetry, mobile companions, cross-platform builds, and monetisation are all explicit non-goals. See docs/01-PDD.md.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.