cliplens

Drop ClipLens into any agent — Claude Code, Kiro, Copilot, Gemini, Cursor, your own — and it can read and write the system clipboard in the native formats real apps use: generate a Slack message with real bold/links, a Mural sticky note, an Outlook-ready HTML email, or read back what you copied from Figma/Mural or a console — with no API keys, no OAuth, no marketplace approval. It's provider-agnostic (an MCP server

• a plain SKILL.md) and it just works. Just:

generate → clipboard → paste.

Most integrations die on auth, rate limits, and approval queues. The clipboard doesn't. Every app already speaks it. ClipLens turns that into a universal adapter layer.

Drive it in plain English

No flags to memorize. ClipLens ships as a provider-agnostic agent skill (SKILL.md) — drop it into any agent (Claude Code, Kiro, Copilot, Gemini, Cursor…) and just say what you want:

"paste this as a Slack message" · "read the Mural I just copied" · "put this table on my clipboard for Outlook" · "clean up this console dump"

Your agent picks the right lens or pen, writes the native format, and tells you to hit Ctrl+V. A tiny background clip daemon flashes a popup so you see it land. Prefer the CLI? That works too.

Related MCP server: clippy

The idea: Lenses & Pens

You paste. The app thinks a human did it.

copy / paste
   │
ClipLens  ──►  Lens (read)  ──►  structured data for your agent
          ◄──  Pen  (write) ◄──  your agent's content
   │
native clipboard format  ──►  Ctrl+V into Slack / Mural / Outlook / …

Proven adapters

Install

git clone https://github.com/TheJesper/cliplens
cd cliplens

# One command — installs deps, links the global CLI, and wires ClipLens into
# EVERY AI client it detects (Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Gemini, Codex,
# Cursor, Windsurf, VS Code Copilot, Kiro). Re-run after every `git pull`.
./install.sh          # macOS / Linux
.\install.ps1         # Windows (PowerShell)

Prefer to do it by hand, or only wire some clients?

npm install && npm link              # global CLI aliases only
node tools/install.mjs --list        # show detected AI clients
node tools/install.mjs               # wire them all (MCP + skill)
node tools/install.mjs --only claude-code,gemini,codex
node tools/install.mjs --dry-run     # preview, write nothing

The installer merges into each client's own config format (JSON mcpServers / servers, or Codex TOML [mcp_servers]) and drops a SKILL.md where the client looks for one. It backs up every file it touches and never removes other servers.

CLI

💡 Give your agent DevTools eyes. In Chrome, right-click inside the console → Copy console, then run clipconsole (or the cliplens_analyze tool). ClipLens strips 99%+ of the noise — keeping the signal (CORS, HTTP statuses, net::ERR_, failed requests) — so your agent reads only what matters. No screenshots, no copy-paste-scroll.

MCP server (agents)

ClipLens ships an MCP server so agents (Claude Code, Kiro, …) can read/write the clipboard as tools.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "cliplens": { "command": "node", "args": ["<path-to>/cliplens/src/mcp-server.js"] }
  }
}

Tools: cliplens_analyze · _text · _capture · _formats · _inspect · _save_image · _write_slack · _write_plaintext · _lens. Generated text runs through humanize() (strips em-dashes, curly quotes, zero-width spaces, BOM — the tells that a machine wrote it).

Clip daemon & popup

cliplens-daemon (in cliplens-toast/, cross-platform Rust via wry) is an optional lightweight background service that makes the clipboard visible:

• Popup toast — when a clip is written, a warm rounded overlay flashes with a per-type pixel-perfect icon (Slack / Mural / Image / Prompt / clipboard), the clip type as a chip (Slack · Mural · Image · Prompt · Normal…) and the sender (which agent made it) as a badge — so you get confirmation without switching windows. Click the card to dismiss it; otherwise it fades on its own, and multiple clips stack.

• Clip-history picker — a configurable global hotkey (default Shift+Alt+V, cross-platform, macOS + Windows) opens the last N clips to re-paste any of them.

One binary, one identical design on Windows/macOS/Linux (HTML/CSS in the webview — no per-OS fallback). Fire one manually:

cliplens-daemon --notify --title "ClipLens" --subtitle "Ctrl+V" --type Slack --agent my-agent --kind clip
cliplens-daemon --watch      # run persistently (enables the history picker)

Install: download a prebuilt binary from Releases (built by CI for every OS — no Rust needed), or build once with cargo build --release in cliplens-toast/. If the daemon isn't present, writes still work and a plain native OS toast fires instead.

Private adapters (keep company stuff out of the public repo)

ClipLens ships only generic, public lenses & pens. Anything org-specific — an internal tool's format, a proprietary board, a company log filter — goes in gitignored folders so it can never leak upstream:

private-lenses/   ← your read adapters   (gitignored)
private-pens/     ← your write adapters  (gitignored)

Drop a .js file exporting the lens/pen shape (see examples/); it's auto-discovered by src/private.js. Nothing in those folders is ever committed. Fork the core freely; keep your adapters private.

Platform

Plaintext read/write works everywhere; rich native formats are Windows-first.

On Linux, install a clipboard tool so read/write works: sudo apt install wl-clipboard (Wayland) or xclip / xsel (X11). macOS needs nothing extra.

Developed on Kiro; works with Claude Code, Gemini, Codex and any MCP agent. The rich-format pens/lenses still lean on the .NET clipboard API — a macOS/Linux port of those (via osascript / native clipboard formats) would be a hugely welcome PR. 🙏

Roadmap — being worked on as we speak

• macOS / Linux clipboard shims (the daemon is built cross-platform; the Node clipboard bridge needs porting)

• More lenses & pens (Notion, Miro, Confluence, Jira…)

• Multiclip ring buffer — recall the last 10 clips by timestamp

Contributing

You can fork — but I'd genuinely rather build this with you. Open an issue or a PR and I'll happily review it. See CONTRIBUTING.md. This is open source (MIT) and meant to stay that way.

License & credits

MIT © Jesper Wilfing

Icons: FatCow Farm-Fresh Web Icons — licensed under CC BY 3.0.