0
Servers, relays, or accounts
⌘C · ⌘VSynced
Your clipboard,
in sync. Across your Macs.
TandemClip shares your clipboard between your Macs over the local network — copy on one, paste on another. Text, rich text, images, files and folders, all at full fidelity. End-to-end encrypted with a code only you hold. No cloud, no account, nothing ever leaves your network.
Free · macOS 13+ · Apple Silicon · Developer ID signed & notarized · auto-updates
LAN-only, PSK-TLS encrypted
Propagates in under a second
Mirror or Manual
Open source · MIT
Why TandemClip
Universal Clipboard, without the strings.
Apple's Universal Clipboard needs the same Apple ID, Bluetooth proximity, and is often disabled on managed machines. TandemClip needs none of that — any Macs on the same network that share a pairing code sync their clipboards, and nothing leaves the LAN.
<1s
Typical propagation across the mesh
600k
PBKDF2 iterations on your code
100 MB
Per-clip transfer ceiling
How it works
One clipboard across all your Macs —
or pull a specific one on demand.
Mirror mode
Copy anywhere and it appears everywhere. Deduped by content hash, loop-safe, and relayed across machines that can't see each other directly, so a partial mesh still fully syncs.
Manual mode
Keep each Mac's clipboard its own. Pull the current clipboard from a specific Mac when you want it — or turn on auto-apply to receive hands-free while staying manual on send.
Roles & trust
Set any Mac to Send + Receive, Receive-only, or Send-only. Restrict sync to a trusted-device allowlist and revoke a machine without rotating the code everywhere.
Self-healing transport: a reconcile loop re-dials any peer it loses, so sync survives sleep/wake and Wi-Fi roams.
Everything on your clipboard
Not just text. Anything you copy, at full fidelity.
Text & rich text
Plain text and formatted RTF. Every enabled representation travels with the clip, so paste keeps fonts, styling and links intact.
Images
PNG and TIFF copy and paste between Macs like they never left the pasteboard — screenshots, crops, anything.
Files
Transferred by content, not a dead reference. Always captured to history; enable auto-sync to have copied files land on your other Macs.
Folders
⌘C a folder (or drop it on the picker) and it travels as a .zip archive, unpacked cleanly on the other side.
Big transfers
Clips up to 100 MB travel as signed 1 MB slices — chunked so a large file or folder moves reliably across the LAN.
Secrets, respected
Content flagged concealed, transient or auto-generated by 1Password, Keychain and most managers is never synced.
The clipboard picker
A visual browser for every clip, on every Mac.
Press ⇧⌘V to open a searchable window of recent clips from your whole fleet. Preview, navigate by keyboard, and grab the item you need.
- Shared fleet timeline. In Mirror mode every Mac sees the same recent clips, grouped into per-Mac collapsible sections.
- Sorted by type. Text, Images, Documents, Audio, Video and Files sub-sections with count badges and per-item sizes.
- Rich hover previews. QuickLook renders PDF pages, Office docs and video frames, with media duration — right in the card.
- Keyboard-first. Arrow-key navigation and ⌘1–⌘9 quick-pick.
- Drag in, drag out. Drop files onto the picker to send them now; drag any clip out to Finder or another app.
Reach & recall
Send it anywhere. Find it by meaning.
AirDrop a clip
A hover action pushes any clip to nearby Apple devices outside your mesh — an iPhone, iPad or someone else's Mac — through the system share sheet.
Send from any app
A "Send to TandemClip" item appears in every app's Services menu — push selected text or files to your Macs without copying first.
Search by meaning
On-device semantic search across your history, full clip text, and even OCR'd text inside screenshots. Describe it and TandemClip finds it — nothing leaves the Mac.
Quick actions
From the hover preview: open a link, start an email, copy a phone number, or save an attachment to Downloads — detected locally, no round-trip.
Pinned clips
Keep up to 20 clips permanently — synced across Macs and restart-proof. Pins and unpins are signed and relayed like any clip.
Delete everywhere
Remove a clip from the picker and it vanishes from history, clipboards, and received files on every Mac — a signed, relayed erase.
Bring your own AI
Clean up, summarize, translate — with your own model.
Point TandemClip at any OpenAI-compatible endpoint — a hosted API or a fully local Ollama / LM Studio — and act on clips right where they live. Optional, off by default, and your key lives in the Keychain.
- Compose & clean up. A compose area with editable tone presets, auto-tone by destination app, changelog provenance, and a fallback endpoint.
- Act on clips. On-demand Summarize, opt-in smart titles, and opt-in translation of incoming clips.
- Ask your clipboard. Retrieval-grounded answers over your own history — ask a question, get an answer cited from your clips.
- Private by construction. Local models keep everything on-device; off-LAN endpoints are HTTPS-enforced.
Private by design
Your clipboard never leaves your network.
A code only you hold
Your pairing code is the only shared secret. It's stretched with PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA256 at 600,000 iterations into a 256-bit PSK-TLS key. Wrong code → handshake fails → peer rejected.
No cloud, no relay
Peers talk directly over your LAN via Bonjour + Network.framework. There's no server, no account, and nothing to breach. Being on the same Wi-Fi grants nothing on its own.
Trusted-device allowlist
Off by default, the code is the trust boundary. Turn it on to pin specific devices by signing key and revoke one — the way to cut off a Mac that once knew the code.
Secret guard
Likely credentials — keys, cards, tokens — are held back until you explicitly release them, in case an app forgets to flag them as concealed.
Privacy hold & Wi-Fi guard
One click (✋) stops anything leaving this Mac — broadcasts, pulls, previews and AI calls. A Wi-Fi network guard confines sync to networks you choose.
Keychain-stored, no telemetry
Your code lives in the login Keychain. Crash reporting is off unless you build it in — no PII, IP, or identifiers ever. Fully open about what syncs.
Under the hood
Polls the pasteboard, syncs over encrypted LAN links.
ClipboardWatcher
- polls
NSPasteboard - changeCount every ~0.4s
- skips concealed types
Transport
- Bonjour
_tandemclip._tcp - PSK-TLS over Network.framework
- en0 only · auto-reconnect
local copy · encrypted peer clip
SyncEngine
state
MenuBarController
pause · peers · last sync · pairing code
Menu-bar only
Runs as a background agent — a sync-arrows glyph in the menu bar shows peers, last sync and your code. No Dock icon, no window in your way.
Guided settings & help
A sidebar Settings window with plain-English descriptions on every section, and Help with worked examples and its own on-device semantic search.
Auto-updating
Every release is Developer ID signed, notarized and EdDSA-signed for Sparkle — installed copies update themselves and refuse an unsigned or downgraded feed.
Open & auditable
Free, open source, and you can read every line.
TandemClip is MIT-licensed and built in the open. The privacy claims aren't a promise — the source, the security model, and the full change history are all public. Nothing to trust that you can't verify yourself.
Read the source →
The full app on GitHub under the MIT license. Build it yourself, star it, or send a pull request.
Security policy & threat model →
Exactly what TandemClip defends against — the PSK-TLS design, signed device identity, and how to report an issue.
Changelog →
Every release, documented. Ships signed and version-checked through Sparkle auto-update.
Install with Homebrew: brew tap anatoliv/tandemclip https://github.com/anatoliv/tandemclip, then brew trust anatoliv/tandemclip, then brew install --cask tandemclip. (Homebrew 6 and later requires third-party taps to be trusted explicitly.)
Questions
Good to know before you install.
What do I need to run it?+
macOS 13 or later on Apple Silicon, and two or more Macs on the same local network. Set the same pairing code on each Mac — copy it from Settings → Identity on one machine and type it into the others. Applying re-keys the connection live, no relaunch.
Is it really LAN-only?+
Yes. Discovery is Bonjour on your local network and connections are PSK-TLS over Apple's Network.framework, infrastructure Wi-Fi only. There is no internet relay, no server, and no account — nothing to breach and nothing that leaves your network.
Will it sync my passwords?+
No. Content marked concealed, transient or auto-generated (the
nspasteboard.org markers 1Password, Keychain and most managers set) is never synced. A separate secret guard also holds back likely credentials until you release them. This is best-effort — it depends on the source app flagging the copy.How is it different from Universal Clipboard?+
Universal Clipboard requires the same Apple ID and Bluetooth proximity, and is often disabled on managed machines. TandemClip needs neither — it works across Macs on different Apple IDs, syncs files and folders (not just text and images), keeps a searchable history and picker, and never uses Apple's servers.
Does the AI send my clipboard to the cloud?+
Only if you choose a hosted model. AI is off by default and bring-your-own — point it at a local Ollama or LM Studio and everything stays on-device. If you use a remote endpoint, it must be HTTPS. Your API key is stored in the Keychain.
Is it free? How do updates work?+
Yes, it's free. Every build is Developer ID signed and notarized, and updates ship via Sparkle — Check for Updates… from the menu, or let it update automatically. The updater verifies an EdDSA signature and refuses any unsigned or version-regressed feed.
Can I use it on managed / corporate Macs?+
Often, but check first: some MDM profiles block unmanaged login agents, and host firewalls / EDR may block inbound LAN connections between machines. Because it's notarized, Gatekeeper is satisfied out of the box.
Free · macOS 13+
Copy here. Paste there.
Install it on each Mac, share one pairing code, and your clipboard just follows you.
Version 0.24.1 · Apple Silicon · Developer ID signed & notarized