Stop Hand-Fixing Pasted Terminal Output

You copy a query result out of psql, paste it into Slack, and it lands as a jumble of pipes, dashes, and misaligned columns. You paste AI output into a doc and spend two minutes deleting em-dashes and smart quotes. You grab a log snippet for a bug report and it’s wrapped in ANSI color codes and timestamp noise.

I got tired of cleaning that up by hand every single time — so I built PipeCleaner to do it instantly.

What It Does

PipeCleaner is a lightweight, privacy-respecting Mac app that turns messy copied text into clean, readable text:

  • Fixes broken tables Detects ASCII tables from psql, MySQL, Docker, and friends — and reformats them as Markdown, CSV, TSV, JSON, LaTeX, or clean Word/Pages-ready tables. Wrapped rows get merged back together.

  • Strips terminal noise ANSI color codes, shell prompts, log prefixes, box-drawing decorations, stray pipes, and line numbers — gone in one pass.

  • Tidies AI output Replaces em-dashes and smart quotes, converts box callouts, unescapes quotes, and normalizes whitespace so pasted LLM text reads like you wrote it.

  • Cleans on your terms Every transform is a toggle with a live side-by-side preview. Sort lines, remove duplicates, strip HTML tags, format JSON, trim trailing whitespace — use exactly the set you need.

Five Ways to Feed It Text

  1. The window — paste on the left, copy the cleaned result on the right. The preview updates as you type or flip a toggle.
  2. Auto-Clean from the menu bar — flip one switch and text copied from Terminal, iTerm2, Ghostty, Warp, or VS Code is cleaned the moment it hits your clipboard. One-click undo if it ever touches something it shouldn’t.
  3. The CLI — claude -p 'explain' | pipecleaner sends cleaned output straight to your clipboard. Settings → CLI gives you a copy-paste install command (no sudo).
  4. The Services menu — select text in any app, right-click, and choose “Clean with PipeCleaner.”
  5. Shortcuts — “Clean Text” and “Clean Clipboard” actions for your own automations.

Why You’ll Want This

  • Paste query results into Slack, Notion, or GitHub as real Markdown tables
  • File bug reports with clean log excerpts instead of ANSI soup
  • Make AI-generated text paste-ready without manual fixes
  • Keep a running count of every line it’s fixed for you, right in the menu bar

Requirements

  • macOS 15.0 or later
  • Apple Silicon and Intel supported
  • Built in Swift with native system APIs

Privacy

PipeCleaner makes zero network connections. No analytics, no telemetry, no cloud — every transform runs locally on your Mac. Full privacy policy →

Available Now

PipeCleaner is available on the Mac App Store. No subscriptions — just clean text.

👉 Get it on the Mac App Store