What is pastry?

Pastry is a clipboard manager for Mac computers that lets you search everything you have ever copied by describing what it means, not just by typing the exact words it contains. Press a keyboard shortcut and type something like "the api key from this morning" or "mike's address," and Pastry finds the right clip even if your search does not share a single word with it. It does this using a small local model that turns text into meaning based comparisons, so it does not need the internet to work. Every time you copy something, whether it is text, a screenshot, or an image, Pastry saves it automatically and remembers which app it came from. It can tell the difference between plain text, links, emails, colors, and code, and shows each type a little differently, for example a hex color gets a small preview swatch. If you copy the same thing twice, it just moves back to the top instead of creating a duplicate. You can pin important clips so they never get deleted, and set rules for how long regular clips and images stick around before being cleaned up automatically. Everything runs entirely on your own computer. There are no accounts, no network calls, and no data sent anywhere. All your clipboard history lives in a folder on your Mac, and deleting that folder wipes everything. Content that password managers mark as sensitive is skipped so it never gets saved in the first place. Under the hood, Pastry pairs a Swift app you see and interact with, with a small Python program running quietly in the background that watches your clipboard and handles the searching. The easiest way to use it is downloading the ready made app from the project's releases page and dragging it into your Applications folder, no coding tools required. Developers who want to build it from source can run a single install script instead. It currently works only on newer Apple Silicon Macs running a recent version of macOS.