combine-maccy-pastes

Combine the most recent Maccy clipboard entries into a single Markdown document.

This is a small macOS utility for turning a run of clipboard history into one file you can save, share, or feed into another tool.

Main Use Case

combine-maccy-pastes 25 meeting-notes.md

That writes the last 25 Maccy pastes into meeting-notes.md as plain Markdown content blocks, newest first, separated by blank lines.

Defaults:

• combine-maccy-pastes still uses 10 and combined.md

Why

Maccy is good at storing lots of clipboard history. It is less convenient when you want to turn the last few copies into one clean document. This script does that without adding headings or metadata to the output by default.

Features

• Auto-detects the Maccy Storage.sqlite database
• Combines the last N clipboard entries into one Markdown file
• Skips image-only clipboard entries automatically
• Supports copying the combined result back to the clipboard
• Works from any directory as long as it can find the Maccy database
• Captures key implementation decisions in MADRs

Installation

From npm after publish:

npm install -g combine-maccy-pastes

Without installing globally:

npx combine-maccy-pastes 25 meeting-notes.md

From source during local development:

git clone https://github.com/mliq/combine-maccy-pastes.git
cd combine-maccy-pastes

Requirements:

• macOS with Maccy
• Node.js
• sqlite3 available on your PATH

If sqlite3 is missing on macOS, install it with:

brew install sqlite

Usage

combine-maccy-pastes [count] [output.md] [--copy]

Examples:

combine-maccy-pastes
combine-maccy-pastes 25
combine-maccy-pastes 25 meeting-notes.md
combine-maccy-pastes notes.md
combine-maccy-pastes 10 --copy

From a local clone, use node combine-maccy-pastes.js ... instead.

Sample Session

$ combine-maccy-pastes 5 notes.md
$ cat notes.md
First copied note

Second copied note

Third copied note

Example Output

If your recent clipboard history is:

First note
Second note
Third note

Then:

combine-maccy-pastes 3 combined.md

Produces:

First note

Second note

Third note

Options

• positional count: Number of recent Maccy items to combine. Defaults to 10.
• positional output.md: Output Markdown file path. Defaults to combined.md.
• --copy: Copy the combined result to the clipboard with pbcopy
• --db: Use a specific SQLite database path
• -: Use - as the output path to write to stdout instead of a file
• -h, --help: Show usage

Database Detection

If --db is not provided, the script looks for Storage.sqlite in this order:

1. The standard Maccy container path in the current user's home directory
2. The current working directory
3. Next to combine-maccy-pastes.js for local/dev setups

Notes

• This project targets macOS with Maccy.
• Finder file-copy entries are treated like any other text-backed clipboard item.
• Image-only clipboard entries are skipped automatically.

Decisions

Project decisions are tracked in docs/adr/README.md. The release checklist lives in docs/release-checklist.md.

License

MIT