CustomPaste: A New Local-First Clipboard Tool

Solo developer Joseph has launched CustomPaste, a clipboard utility designed to provide granular control over text formatting. The tool addresses the frustration of choosing between keeping messy formatting or stripping everything to plain text. Instead of a single paste behavior, CustomPaste allows users to create reusable 'Recipes' to define exactly how text should be processed.

Key capabilities include preserving specific formatting like bold and italics while normalizing font families, as well as structural cleanup like removing duplicate lines. The application runs 100% locally, ensuring privacy, and is offered as a one-time purchase rather than a subscription.

The standard clipboard experience often forces users into a binary decision: keep all the messy formatting or strip everything down to plain text. Joseph, a solo developer, identified this pain point and built CustomPaste to solve it. While standard shortcuts like Ctrl+Shift+V exist to paste as plain text, they are often too destructive, removing useful elements like hyperlinks, bolding, and lists.

Joseph wanted a tool that allowed him to "strip exactly what I want, and keep exactly what I want." This philosophy drove the development of a solution that offers precision rather than an all-or-nothing approach. The goal is to normalize specific elements, such as forcing a font family to Arial 11pt or removing background colors, without losing the structural integrity of the text.

CustomPaste introduces a workflow based on reusable 'Recipes' rather than a single paste behavior. These recipes allow users to define specific rules for how text should land in their editor. The app intercepts the clipboard, processes the structure locally, and transforms it based on the user's defined rules.

The tool offers granular control over several categories of text manipulation:

• Smart Preservation: Users can strip or set specific font families and sizes while specifically preserving bold, italics, and hyperlinks.
• Structure: It is possible to preserve tables while simultaneously stripping images contained within them.
• Data Cleanup: The tool can instantly purge duplicate lines, sort lists alphabetically, or flatten extra blank lines.
• Text Fixes: It cleans up AI-generated artifacts, such as "smart quotes" or em-dashes, and enforces casing rules like Title Case or Sentence Case.

A core component of CustomPaste is its commitment to privacy. The application runs 100% locally on the user's machine. There is no cloud processing involved, and the developer states there is no data harvesting. This local-first architecture ensures that sensitive clipboard data never leaves the user's device.

Regarding the business model, the tool is offered as a one-time purchase with a lifetime license, explicitly avoiding the subscription models common in modern software. To allow potential users to test the workflow, there is a free trial available that covers the first 100 pastes. This allows users to verify if the 'Recipe' approach fits their specific workflow before committing to a purchase.