JogPad

A clone of Copper: a macOS sidebar for the snippets you want to keep and the prompts you want to send next while working with an AI.

Select text in any app, tap Shift twice, and it lands in the sidebar. The sidebar shows itself without taking the keyboard, so you keep reading where you were. Pick several items later, hit ⌘⇧C, and paste them as a numbered list into a prompt box.

Everything is one markdown file under ~/Library/Application Support/com.ycmjason.jogpad/notes.md. No account, no sync, no telemetry.

JogPad owns the shape of that file: ## headings are pages, task-list entries are items. It rewrites the whole file whenever you capture or edit, so freeform markdown it does not model will not survive. Reading it, copying from it and diffing it are all fine. Hand-editing it alongside JogPad is not.

Shortcuts

Keys	What happens
Shift Shift	With text selected: capture it and show the sidebar. With nothing selected: open the sidebar and focus the input. While JogPad has the keyboard: hide it
⌘K	Switch or create a page. Hover a page to rename or delete it
⌘⇧C	Copy the selected items as a numbered list
⌘F	Search across every page
⌘A	Select everything visible
↑ / ↓	Move the selection, ⇧ to extend it
⌫	Delete the selected items
⌘- / ⌘+ / ⌘0	Zoom out, in, or back to 100%. The window resizes with it
⌘W	Hide the sidebar. Capture keeps working while it is hidden
⌘Q	Quit
Enter / ⇧Enter	While editing an item: save, or start a new line

Clicking the menu bar icon toggles the sidebar; right-clicking it opens Show, Hide and Quit. The same commands live behind the ⋮ button in JogPad's own header, because an accessory app has no menu bar of its own. Hiding only hides the window, so double-tapping Shift still files captures away.

The panel border brightens while JogPad has keyboard focus and dims when it does not. There is no title bar to carry that signal otherwise.

Updating

JogPad updates itself. It checks on launch and offers the update in the ⋮ menu; nothing downloads until you click. Stable and Beta are a toggle in that same menu, not separate builds, so switching costs you no permissions. Beta gets prerelease tags and folds back into stable when stable is newer.

Installing

Download it from jogpad.fishball.app, or grab the DMG straight from Releases. One universal build covers Apple silicon and Intel.

Drag JogPad to /Applications, then open it and grant Accessibility access when asked. Install before granting: macOS keys the grant to the app's path and code signature, so moving it afterwards means granting again.

Watching the keyboard actually needs two separate grants, Accessibility and Input Monitoring. JogPad asks for the second one itself once the first lands, and macOS hands it over without a prompt, so there is normally nothing to do. If the banner stays up, clicking it opens the right pane in System Settings.

If macOS calls the app damaged, that build went out unsigned. Clear the quarantine flag and it will open:

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

Running it

Needs Node, pnpm, and a Rust toolchain new enough for Tauri 2 (1.85+).

pnpm install
pnpm dev

macOS will ask for Accessibility access the first time you double-tap Shift. Without it the app still works as a scratchpad, it just cannot read other apps' selections.

Layout

apps/desktop/src         React front end
apps/desktop/src-tauri   Rust: markdown store, event tap, selection reader, NSPanel

cargo test --manifest-path apps/desktop/src-tauri/Cargo.toml covers the markdown round trip and the double-tap detector.

Releasing

Tag a version and CI does the rest:

git tag v0.1.0 && git push --tags

The workflow typechecks, runs the Rust tests, builds a universal DMG on a macOS runner and attaches it to a draft release. Nothing goes public until you publish it. macOS is not optional there: hdiutil, codesign and the AppleScript that styles the DMG window exist nowhere else.

Builds are signed and notarised when the Apple credentials are present as repository secrets, and fall back to ad-hoc signing when they are not.

Licence

MIT. See LICENSE.

JogPad is an independent reimplementation of Copper, built from its public description. No code from Copper was used, and it is not affiliated with or endorsed by shadcn.