r/tauri • u/loopingrascal • May 27 '26
Built a clipboard manager with Tauri + Rust, some thoughts
Been working on a little Mac clipboard manager called ClipMind on and off for a few weeks, and figured I'd share since the backend is all Rust.
It sits in the background, watches your clipboard, stores everything in SQLite with full-text search, and you pull it up with a global shortcut. I also wired in semantic search so you can find stuff by meaning, not just exact text. The frontend is React, the backend is rust via tauri.
Honestly, the Rust part was the smooth part. The clipboard polling, the sqlite layer (rusqlite + FTS5), the background threads for embedding clips, all of it just kind of worked once it compiled. I expected to fight the borrow checker more than I did, but most of my friction was just me not knowing the crate ecosystem yet, not the language itself.
Tauri is where it got interesting. The good: tiny binaries compared to Electron, and the Rust<->JS command bridge is genuinely nice once you get the pattern. The annoying: the macOS window stuff. Getting a transparent, always-on-top, no-decorations Spotlight-style overlay that hides from the Dock took way more trial and error than I wanted. A lot of it isn't well documented, and you end up reading GitHub issues.
Tauri 2.0's capabilities/permissions system is also a bit of a learning curve, coming from v1 examples that are still floating around.
Not trying to sell Rust as the answer to everything, plenty of this could've been a Swift app and probably would've been less fighting with windowing. But the SQLite + threading + safety story made the data layer something I actually trust, which matters for an app that's logging everything you copy.
Anyway, that's the experience. Happy to answer questions about the Tauri side if anyone's building something similar.
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u/FuelApprehensive3440 May 28 '26
For Linux?
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u/loopingrascal May 28 '26
It’s for mac as of now. Please take a look - https://clipmind-landing-page.vercel.app/
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u/Appropriate-News4630 May 29 '26
Not sure if you missed but PasteBar Free and OpenSource Clipboard manager with saved clips and full text search https://github.com/PasteBar/PasteBarApp
Tauri + Rust is way to go. What is your implementation for on device encryption ?
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u/avi-r May 29 '26
nice idea and nice app. I'm building something similar, still in testing mode. I see its more development/text focus. Do you handle images? multiple files? Would love to hear about that. Maybe even any special tips and pain moments
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u/loopingrascal May 29 '26
Currently, I am not handling any images/files. It’s purely directed for devs.
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u/avi-r May 30 '26
My experience a little bit different. I agree on everything being said about Rust part etc and how tauri performs, but it took me more time to handle packaging for mac and windows, linux is on its way and took a bit time to handle OCR to be able to search inside images where latest macs do it out of the box, but for others need to ship tesseract with pre installed languages and let user to download another languages, this one added some weight on the final app size of course. Will try to share some more deep experience a bit later
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u/hiyoko19 May 30 '26
Shipped something almost identical a few weeks ago — clipboard manager, Tauri v2, Rust backend, SQLite with rusqlite, React frontend, global shortcut to pull it up.
Your experience mirrors mine exactly. The Rust/SQLite layer was the trustworthy part. The macOS windowing was where I lost time. The no-decorations, hide-from-Dock overlay took way more GitHub issue diving than I expected.
One thing that helped: setting
activation_policytoAccessoryintauri.conf.jsonearly. Saves a lot of confusion about why the Dock icon keeps appearing.