SmartTrim

SmartTrim

macOS menu bar utility that fixes mangled clipboard text from AI coding assistants.

You know the problem: you're deep in Claude Code, Cursor, or Copilot, copy some text, paste it into Slack or Notion, and it's full of ghost indentation, hard line breaks mid-sentence, and weird formatting artifacts.

SmartTrim sits in your menu bar and fixes it automatically.

Features

• Auto-Trim — Monitors clipboard, automatically cleans malformed text
• Manual Trim — Global hotkey (⌘⇧.) or menu bar button
• Smart Detection — Only processes text that looks broken
• Preserves Structure — Keeps lists, paragraphs, and intentional formatting

What It Fixes

Problem	Example
Ghost indentation	text with invisible leading spaces
Hard-wrapped lines	This sentence was\nbroken mid-flow
Mixed formatting	Bullet points with broken continuations

Install

Download from [Releases](https://github.com/gmickel/SmartTrim/releases) or build from source:

brew install xcodegen
git clone https://github.com/gmickel/SmartTrim.git
cd SmartTrim
xcodegen && xcodebuild -scheme SmartTrim -configuration Release

Requirements

• macOS 14.0 (Sonoma) or later
• Apple Silicon or Intel

Settings

• Launch at Login — Start automatically
• Auto-Trim — Enable/disable clipboard monitoring
• Hotkey — Customize the manual trim shortcut

Tech

Swift 6, SwiftUI, strict concurrency. No Electron. No dependencies. ~500 lines.

Author

**Gordon Mickel** — [mickel.tech](https://mickel.tech)

Origin

Built as part of [gmickel-bench](https://mickel.tech/gmickel-bench), a project comparing AI coding assistants on real-world task