We've all pressed Ctrl+C a million times. Linux solved this in the 1980s — the rest of us didn't.

Parth Dixit — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 05:44:54 +0000

Pay attention to the next thing you copy on your computer. Actually watch yourself do it.

You don't do one thing. You do two: you select the text, then you press Ctrl+C. And if your hands are on the mouse, it's often worse — select, right-click, hunt for "Copy" in a menu, click it. Two steps, sometimes three.

Pasting is the same trap. You don't just paste — you first click into the place you want the text to land (activate the field, position the cursor), then you press Ctrl+V. Two steps again.

So the simplest possible action — move this text from here to there — is really four discrete actions: select, copy, click-to-place, paste.

Now here's the part that got me: you do this maybe a thousand times a day. Coding, replying to messages, filling forms, moving a link, grabbing an error to paste into a search bar. It's so automatic you've stopped seeing it. It's the background radiation of using a computer.

And once I saw it, I couldn't unsee it. Why are we doing four things for one thing?

Linux noticed this 40 years ago (and fixed half of it)

Turns out one half of this was solved in the 1980s. On Linux/X11 there's something called the PRIMARY selection: you highlight text and it's already copied — no keystroke, no menu. The act of selecting is the act of copying. It's been sitting in the X Window System since 1984.

Mac and Windows never adopted it. So half the friction we all live with has had a fix for four decades — it just never crossed over.

That bugged me enough to try building it. The result is Pluks, and the goal was to collapse those four actions down.

Feel it in 2 seconds, no download: go to pluks.app and select any text on the page. It's already on your clipboard.

The whole idea: 4 steps → fewer

Copy becomes 1 step. You select text. That's it — it's copied. The select is the copy, exactly like Linux has always done.
Paste becomes 1 step. A single deep-click (press-and-hold) in any text field both activates that spot and drops the text there — no separate "click to place, then Ctrl+V." One gesture does both halves.

So the four-action ritual — select, copy, click, paste — compresses toward select … deep-click. The thing your hands already wanted to do, minus the bureaucracy.

There's also a searchable history of your last 200 clips (Ctrl+Shift+V / ⌘⇧V from anywhere), because once copying is frictionless you copy more, and losing things gets annoying fast.

The part I actually want to talk about: making it work across OSes

I built it in Rust + Tauri (not Electron — the whole binary is under 10 MB; for something running in your menu bar all day, every idle megabyte is a tax the user pays forever).

But the genuinely hard problem wasn't the UI. It was detecting "a selection just happened" on three operating systems that each disagree about what that even means:

Linux hands it to you — the PRIMARY selection buffer already exists at the protocol level.
macOS has no native equivalent. You go through the Accessibility API to observe selection changes — which is also why there's a one-time permission prompt on first launch (the part everyone's rightly suspicious of). No Accessibility access, no select-to-copy. There's no quieter way to do it on macOS, and I'd rather explain that than bury it.
Windows is its own dance through clipboard and focus APIs to figure out when a selection has actually settled versus when you're still mid-drag.

The real work was making "the selection is final — copy it now" feel instant without firing on every twitch of the cursor. Too eager and it copies garbage while you're just reading; too lazy and it feels broken. That tightrope was most of the three months.

(Linux users know this tightrope intimately — everyone who's used X11 has at some point highlighted text just to read it, accidentally middle-clicked, and pasted a random sentence into a terminal. The feature and the footgun are the same mechanism.)

Where it's at

It's free. macOS 11+ (universal Apple Silicon + Intel), Windows 10/11 in beta, Linux builds too (though you already have half of this 🐧). Clips never leave your machine — no account, no cloud, anonymous opt-out stats only, never the contents.

But mostly I'm curious whether other people see the four-step thing the way I started to, or whether I just broke my own brain staring at it.

So, two honest questions:

Now that it's pointed out — does the "four actions for one action" bug you, or is it genuinely invisible/fine for you?
What would make you trust a tool that auto-copies on select enough to leave it running all day?

DEV Community: Parth Dixit

We've all pressed Ctrl+C a million times. Linux solved this in the 1980s — the rest of us didn't.

Linux noticed this 40 years ago (and fixed half of it)

The whole idea: 4 steps → fewer

The part I actually want to talk about: making it work across OSes

Where it's at