Ortu

A fast, local-first, privacy-focused clipboard manager.

Built with Tauri (Rust) + SvelteKit + SQLite.

Website · Features · Install · Build from source · Documentation · Contributing

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What is Ortu?

Ortu remembers what you copy so you can paste it again later — instantly, from the keyboard, and without sending anything to the cloud. Everything lives in a local SQLite database on your machine.

It captures text, images, and files, auto-organizes clips into groups, masks detected secrets, and ships a power-user paste stack for pasting several items in sequence across apps.

Local-first by design: no account, no telemetry, no cloud sync. Your clipboard stays on your device.

Features

• 📋 Multi-format capture — text, images, and file selections.
• ⏸️ Pause capture — toggle clipboard monitoring on/off from the header; the choice persists across restarts.
• 🧠 Smart auto-grouping — a rule-based classifier sorts clips (URLs, code, JSON, shell, secrets, and more) with confidence scores.
• 🗂️ Groups & pinning — organize items into user groups; pin the ones you always need. An item can belong to multiple groups.
• 🔎 Fast search — SQLite FTS5 full-text index with a fuzzy re-ranker, plus group:<name> and type filters.
• 🥞 Paste stack — queue multiple clips and paste them one-by-one, in order, into any app.
• 🔐 Sensitive-data protection — detected secrets/keys/tokens can be masked and encrypted at rest (AES‑256‑GCM), revealed only on demand.
• ✂️ Snippets & transforms — reusable snippets with variables, and "Copy as" transforms (JSON pretty/minify, Base64, URL encode, case, slugify…).
• ⚡ Quick-access popup — summon a lightweight picker over any app with a global hotkey.
• ⌨️ Customizable global shortcuts — rebind the global hotkeys in Settings, with one-click restore-to-defaults.
• 🎨 Themes — light, dark, or follow system.
• 🧹 Flexible history retention — clear on reboot (default), keep forever, or age/count limits. Pinned & grouped items are always kept.
• 💾 Backup & restore — JSON backup/restore and plain-text export.
• 🔄 Auto-update — signed updates delivered via GitHub Releases.
• 🪶 Lightweight & native — no bundled browser; a single small binary per platform.

See the full breakdown in docs/FEATURES.md.

Screenshots

Main window — full clipboard history with search, type filters (URLs, text, files) and groups.

Quick popup — summon a lightweight picker over any app with a global hotkey.

Paste Stack — queue items from any app and paste them back in order.

Settings — themes, secret auto-masking, history retention and rebindable global shortcuts.

Supported Platforms

Platform	Status	Notes
macOS	✅	Needs Accessibility permission for direct paste
Windows	✅	Requires WebView2 runtime
Linux	✅	X11/Wayland via WebKitGTK

Install

Download the latest installer for your OS from the Releases page.

Platform	Artifacts
macOS	.dmg, .app
Windows	.msi, .exe (NSIS)
Linux	.AppImage, .deb

macOS Gatekeeper note (unsigned builds)

If macOS reports the app is "damaged", clear the quarantine attribute:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/Ortu.app"
codesign --force --deep --sign - "/Applications/Ortu.app"
open "/Applications/Ortu.app"

This is expected for binaries that aren't notarized with an Apple Developer account. See docs/PRIVACY_AND_SECURITY.md.

Keyboard shortcuts (defaults)

Action	macOS	Windows / Linux
Open quick popup	⌥V	Alt+V
Copy selection to stack (any app)	⌘⇧C	Ctrl+Shift+C
Paste next item from stack	⌥⇧V	Alt+Shift+V
Quick copy by position	⌘1–9	Ctrl+1–9
Pin / unpin	⌘P	Ctrl+P
Add to group	⌘C	Ctrl+C
Add selected item to stack	⌘S	Ctrl+S

Global shortcuts are rebindable in Settings. Full reference: docs/SHORTCUTS.md.

Build from source

Prerequisites

• Rust toolchain (stable)
• Node.js (LTS)
• Platform dependencies:
  • macOS: Xcode Command Line Tools
  • Windows: WebView2 Runtime + MSVC build tools
  • Linux: libgtk-3-dev, libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev, libayatana-appindicator3-dev, librsvg2-dev, patchelf

Run in development

git clone https://github.com/abhijith-p-subash/ortu.git
cd ortu
npm install
npm run tauri dev

Production build

npm run tauri build

More detail in docs/DEVELOPMENT.md and docs/BUILD_AND_RELEASE.md.

Documentation

Guide	Description
Overview	Documentation index
Features	Everything Ortu can do
Architecture	How the app is built
Configuration	Settings, retention, storage
Shortcuts	All keyboard shortcuts
Development	Local dev & project layout
Build & Release	Building & publishing
Privacy & Security	Data, encryption, signing
FAQ	Common questions
Roadmap	What's planned

Tech stack

• Frontend: SvelteKit (SPA) + Tailwind CSS
• Backend: Rust + Tauri v2
• Storage: SQLite (WAL) via rusqlite, with a content-addressed blob store for images

Versioning

Update the version across package.json, tauri.conf.json, and Cargo.toml:

npm run version-up <new_version>   # e.g. npm run version-up 2.0.1

Ortu follows Semantic Versioning. Notable changes are recorded in CHANGELOG.md.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please read CONTRIBUTING.md and our Code of Conduct before opening a PR. Found a security issue? See SECURITY.md.

Links

• 🌐 Website: https://ortu.abhijithpsubash.com/
• 📦 Releases: https://github.com/abhijith-p-subash/ortu/releases
• 🐙 Source: https://github.com/abhijith-p-subash/ortu

Support

Ortu is free and open source. If it saves you time, you can support development:

License

MIT © Abhijith P Subash