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What it does

You copy something from a browser or a PDF, paste it into a document, and it arrives carrying fonts, colours, hidden styles and line breaks in all the wrong places. CleanBoard removes all of that.

The whole interaction is one gesture: press the copy shortcut twice within four seconds – Command+C on a Mac, Ctrl+C on Windows. There is no new shortcut to learn and no app to switch to. It sits in the menu bar or system tray and only acts when you ask it to. Everything happens locally; clipboard contents never leave the machine.

Since late 2025 the cleaning itself is configurable. You can have it join lines that were broken mid-sentence while keeping real paragraph breaks, collapse runs of blank lines, strip leading whitespace, trim trailing newlines and tidy URLs – each rule toggled independently.

How it was built

• 2022 – first releases on the Mac App Store.
• November 2022 – a four-second window added to the double-copy, so an ordinary copy followed later by another copy no longer triggered it.
• December 2022 – version 2.0. Moved from paid to free with a one-time unlock.
• 2023 – a long run of maintenance releases.
• May 2025 – an onboarding flow, because a utility triggered by a hidden gesture needs to explain itself.
• November 2025 – configurable cleaning rules on macOS, and the Windows version shipped the following day. Three years a Mac app, then cross-platform in twenty-four hours.

The interesting constraint is that the app has no interface at the moment you use it. Whatever it does has to be right first time, because you have already moved on to pasting. That is why the rules took three years to arrive – guessing correctly is easy for ninety per cent of text, and letting people fix the other ten per cent needed a settings model rather than a smarter guess.

On macOS it is also distributed as a Homebrew cask, which is the least ceremonial way to install a Mac utility:

brew tap tompodab/cleanboard
brew install --cask cleanboard

Status

Actively maintained on both platforms. The most recent releases were November and December 2025. Free for the first 5,000 cleaned characters, then a one-time purchase for unlimited use, with free updates after that.

Platforms

macOS 10.15 and later, via the Mac App Store, a direct download or Homebrew. Windows 10 and 11, via the Microsoft Store.

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Need support? Visit our support page, or see the portfolio.