CopyWheel

A tiny, native macOS menu bar app that does exactly one thing: press a hotkey and a radial menu appears at your mouse cursor — click a segment and that snippet is copied to your clipboard.

No Electron, no clipboard history, no automation platform. Just a wheel of your snippets.

Why

Existing pie menus for macOS are either paid and closed source (Radial, PowerClick) or full automation platforms (Kando). CopyWheel is the minimal open-source alternative for the single use case of "grab a saved text without digging through your notes app".

Features

• 🎡 Radial menu at the cursor, triggered by a global hotkey (default: ⌃⌥C)
• 📋 Click a segment (or press 1–9) → snippet lands in the clipboard
• ⚙️ Simple settings window: edit/reorder snippets, record your own hotkey, launch at login
• 🖱️ Works great with extra mouse buttons: map the button to the hotkey in Logi Options+ / your mouse driver
• 🔐 Secret snippets (tokens, passwords) are stored in the macOS Keychain, not on disk, and masked in the wheel
• 👋 First-launch onboarding with common presets (email, phone, address, token, password)
• 🪶 Native Swift (AppKit + SwiftUI), a few hundred lines, no background bloat
• 💾 Regular snippets stored as plain JSON in ~/Library/Application Support/CopyWheel/snippets.json

Install

Homebrew

brew tap weselski/tap
brew trust weselski/tap   # required once on recent Homebrew versions
brew install --cask weselski/tap/copywheel

Add --no-quarantine to the install command to skip the Gatekeeper warning for this unsigned app.

Manual

Download CopyWheel.dmg from the latest release, open it and drag CopyWheel.app into Applications.

The app is ad-hoc signed (no Apple Developer certificate), so on first launch macOS will warn you. Either right-click the app → Open, or remove the quarantine flag:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/CopyWheel.app

Build & run

Requires macOS 13+ and Xcode command line tools.

make run      # builds, bundles dist/CopyWheel.app and launches it

Other targets: make build (binary only), make bundle (app bundle), make clean.

Usage

1. Click the ◎ icon in the menu bar → Einstellungen… to edit your snippets and hotkey.
2. To trigger it from a mouse button, assign the same keyboard shortcut (default ⌃⌥C) to that button in your mouse software (e.g. Logi Options+ → "Keyboard shortcut").
3. Press the hotkey anywhere → click a slice → paste with ⌘V.

Dismiss the wheel with Esc, by clicking the center, or by clicking anywhere else.

Dependencies

• KeyboardShortcuts — global hotkey + recorder UI

License

MIT