bar-tool · 吧台

A macOS menu bar toolbox that turns whatever is on your clipboard into what you need next.

🇺🇸 English  ·  🇨🇳 简体中文

Copy something messy, click the menu bar, pick a transformation. bar-tool rewrites the clipboard

in place, so the next ⌘V is already the shape you wanted — plain text without the styling,

readable JSON, snake_case, a decoded Base64 blob.

> No account, no window to manage, no network call. The panel shows **what the current clipboard

can become**, never a fixed menu of everything the app can do.

Table of contents

| | | | --- | --- | | What it does | Actions | | Shortcuts | How it works | | Privacy | Project layout | | Build from source | Status | | License | |

What it does

One model, 25 tools: clipboard in → transformation → clipboard out.

• A menu bar panel, not a window. Click the tray icon, pick an action, paste. No dock icon, no

• Only the actions that apply. The list is filtered by what is actually on the clipboard right

• Undo is one keystroke. Every action keeps the previous clipboard, so a wrong pick costs a

• Zero runtime dependencies. Only Electron itself; every transformation is hand-written on top

• Offline by construction. Version 1.1 makes no network requests at all.

Actions

Every action is a pure function; the registry decides what to show for the clipboard at hand.

| Group | Actions | | --- | --- | | Clean up | To plain text · Trim whitespace · Collapse blank lines · Join into one line · Strip line numbers | | Case | UPPERCASE · lowercase · Title Case · camelCase · snake_case · kebab-case · CONSTANT_CASE | | Encoding | Base64 encode/decode · URL encode/decode · HTML escape/unescape | | Data | Beautify JSON · Minify JSON · Sort JSON keys | | Lines | Remove duplicate lines · Sort lines | | Time | Timestamp → local time · Date → timestamp |

Adding a tool means adding one file under electron/actions/ — the panel, the tests and the IPC surface pick it up automatically.

Shortcuts

| Keys | Action | | --- | --- | | ⌥⌘V | Show / hide the panel | | ↑ ↓ | Move through the actions | | ↵ | Run the selected action | | ⌥⌘Z | Undo the last action | | Esc | Close the panel |

How it works

electron/actions/   One file per group of transformations, pure functions
electron/clipboard.cjs
                    Clipboard read/write for Electron 44+'s async clipboard API
electron/main.cjs   Tray, panel window, shortcuts, IPC
src/                Panel renderer: preview, action grid, bilingual copy

Three rules keep it honest:

1. Actions never touch Electron. They take { kind, text, html } and return { text } or

1. The main process owns the clipboard. The renderer only ever sees a preview and a list.
2. Writing back is the end of the flow. No drawers, no side files — the result is on the

Privacy

• The clipboard is read only while the panel is on screen.
• Version 1.1 makes no network request: no telemetry, no crash reporting, no update check.
• Nothing is written to disk yet. Clipboard history (text + images, stored locally) is the next

Project layout

electron/           Main process: tray, panel window, clipboard, IPC surface
electron/actions/   The transformation registry and its groups
src/                Renderer: panel markup, styles, i18n, DOM logic
src/styles/         One dark glass theme, no CSS framework
build/              App icon sources (SVG) and the generated icns
scripts/            afterPack hook that ad-hoc signs the bundle
tests/              node:test suites for the actions

The renderer never touches Node: everything goes through a narrow contextBridge with contextIsolation and sandbox enabled.

Build from source

npm install
npm run dev            # Vite + Electron with hot reload
npm test               # 44 unit tests, no dependencies
npm run dist:arm64     # dmg for Apple Silicon, output in release/
npm run dist:x64       # dmg for Intel

Status

1.1.0 is in development: the action framework, all 25 text tools, undo and the bilingual panel are in place. Next up is clipboard history (text + images), then bucket upload for images, then the official site.

License

Dual-licensed:

• Open source — AGPL-3.0-only. Free to use, modify and self-host. If you distribute

• Commercial — if AGPL does not fit your product (for example, you want to ship a closed-source

The name "吧台 / bar-tool" and the icon are not covered by the open-source grant.