Get help with PipeCleaner

Email: [email protected]

I read every message and respond within 24 hours. If a transform mangled something — include the text you pasted in and what you expected to get out, and I’ll sort it out.

Common questions

Auto-Clean isn’t cleaning my copies

Auto-Clean only rewrites text copied from a terminal app — Terminal, iTerm2, Ghostty, Warp, VS Code, VSCodium. Copies from your browser, email, or anywhere else are deliberately left alone. Check that:

  1. The Auto-Clean toggle in the menu bar dropdown is on.
  2. You copied from one of the terminal apps above (the frontmost app at copy time is what counts).

Auto-Clean changed something I needed

Click the menu bar icon and choose Undo Last Auto-Clean (the original is kept until your clipboard moves on to something else). Auto-Clean also intentionally applies only the line-preserving subset of transforms, so it never collapses newlines or restructures your text in the background.

A VS Code copy got cleaned that shouldn’t have been

macOS can’t distinguish VS Code’s integrated terminal from its editor, so when VS Code is frontmost, Auto-Clean applies to all of its copies. That’s why it uses the conservative transform subset and keeps the undo around. If it bothers you, leave Auto-Clean off and use the window, the Services menu, or the CLI instead.

Tables come out wrong

  • Columns merged or split oddly: toggle Merge wrapped rows — terminal tables often wrap long cells onto a second line, and this setting controls whether those get stitched back together.
  • Wrong output format: pick the table format (Markdown, CSV, TSV, JSON, Word/Pages, LaTeX) in Settings, or per-run with the CLI: --table csv.
  • Something that isn’t a table got “fixed”: turn off Reformat tables for that paste — the live preview updates immediately.

How do I set up the CLI?

Open Settings → CLI in the app. It gives you a copy-paste, no-sudo install command (a small wrapper script, or a shell alias if you prefer). Then:

psql -c 'SELECT …' | pipecleaner --table csv --stdout
cat server.log | pipecleaner --strip-ansi --stdout
claude -p 'explain' | pipecleaner            # clean → clipboard

Every transform has a --<name> / --no-<name> flag to override your saved settings for one run. pipecleaner --help lists them all.

Where is the Services menu item?

Select text in any app, right-click → Services → Clean with PipeCleaner. If it’s not listed, enable it in System Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts → Services → Text.

The menu bar icon disappeared

The menu bar item only lives while PipeCleaner is running. Closing the window keeps it running in the menu bar; quitting (⌘Q) removes it. Relaunch the app to get it back.

Privacy

PipeCleaner collects nothing and connects to nothing. No analytics, no telemetry, no cloud component — every transform runs locally on your Mac, and your clipboard never leaves it.

Full Privacy Policy →

Report a bug or suggest a feature

Email [email protected] with:

  • Your macOS version (Apple menu → About This Mac)
  • The input text (or a representative sample) and what you expected
  • Which transforms were on — a screenshot of the toggles works great

Feature requests are very welcome — this app exists because I got tired of hand-fixing every table I pasted into Slack.