Cooper is a free, open-source recreation of Copper — the Mac capture app by shadcn — for people who want the same workflow on Windows and Linux, not just macOS. If you searched for a Copper app for Windows, a Copper alternative, or an open-source Copper, this is it.
Cooper is an independent community project. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by shadcn — if you're on a Mac, go buy the original; it's great.
Copper's pitch, which Cooper replicates faithfully: the more you use AI, the more you collect little things you don't want to lose — an answer worth keeping, a link, an idea, three follow-up prompts while the current one is still generating. Cooper combines the useful parts of a to-do list, a clipboard, and a scratchpad, purpose-built for AI-assisted work. It sits next to where you work, is always one shortcut away, and works with all your AI apps, terminals, and browsers — ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, anything.
Local and private. No sync, no telemetry, no account. Everything lives in a single SQLite file on your machine.
Grab the latest build from Releases — no compiling needed:
| OS | File to download |
|---|---|
| Windows | Cooper_x.y.z_x64-setup.exe (installer) or Cooper_x.y.z_x64_en-US.msi |
| macOS (Intel & Apple Silicon) | Cooper_x.y.z_universal.dmg |
| Linux | Cooper_x.y.z_amd64.AppImage (portable — chmod +x and run), or .deb / .rpm |
First-run notes:
- Windows: SmartScreen may warn because the binary is unsigned — click More info → Run anyway.
- macOS: drag Cooper out of the disk image into Applications and eject the
image before opening it. Run from the mounted image, macOS keeps relaunching
a throwaway read-only copy, and no permission you grant can ever stick.
Then right-click → Open the first time (or
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Cooper.app), and grant Accessibility for the double-shift shortcuts. Cooper detects each of these states and walks you through whichever one applies. - Linux: the AppImage needs no install. On Wayland use the fallback hotkeys (see below).
- Select text anywhere → double-tap Left Shift → captured.
- Think of a follow-up prompt → double-tap Right Shift → Cooper appears, type it, keep working.
- Send items back into your AI apps and check them off as you go.
| Action | Shortcut |
|---|---|
| Capture selected text (any app) | Left Shift + Left Shift |
| Show / hide Cooper (any app) | Right Shift + Right Shift |
| Show / hide (fallback) | Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + Space |
| Capture (fallback) | Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + C |
| Switch / create section | Ctrl/Cmd + K |
| Copy selected · Copy as list | Ctrl/Cmd + C · Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + C |
| Mark as done / Edit / Delete | Space / Enter / Del |
| Create branch / sub-branch mode | Ctrl/Cmd + B |
| Zoom in / out / reset | Ctrl/Cmd + + / - / 0 |
| Shortcut sheet | Ctrl/Cmd + / |
- Capture panel — frameless, always-on-top, docked to the edge of your screen, summoned and dismissed entirely from the keyboard.
- Sections — type
# Nameto create one; everything you capture lands in the active section until you switch (Ctrl/Cmd+K). Right-click a header to rename, delete, or retarget captures. Type## Nameto start fresh: the new section becomes the active area and everything else collapses upward into compressed one-line dropdowns (click the▸to expand, or just search). - Images & files — drag images or screenshots from your file manager, a
browser, or another app onto the panel, or just paste them with
Ctrl/Cmd+V. Images are stored in Cooper's own folder and shown as thumbnails in the list; click a thumbnail to copy the image back to your clipboard for pasting anywhere. Dropping non-image files or text adds them as notes. While hovering you get a Finder-style+badge with the count. - Focus hand-back — hiding Cooper with
Escreturns focus to the app you were working in. - Inline formatting — cards render
**bold**,*italic*,~~strikethrough~~, and`code`. (Underscore emphasis is intentionally unsupported so captured snake_case and__dunder__code isn't mangled.) - Copy as List — multi-select items and copy them back out as a Markdown list, ready to paste into a prompt.
- Color tags — right-click any note (or a whole selection) for Apple's Finder-style color dots. A tagged note's done-circle takes on its color, and checking it off fills the circle in. Filter from the stacked dots in the search bar: click to roll them open, pick a color. Open sections show their matches, collapsed ones show a count, and headers still open and close.
- Tagging mode —
+→ Tag New Notes → pick a color, and every new note, capture, image, or drawing gets it until you turn it off. The app tints itself in that color so you always know you're in it. - Your own palette — Settings → Edit tags: recolor from a palette or the system color picker, rename, drag to reorder, add or remove colors, and switch the picker animation or app tint off.
- Drag notes between sections — hold a note, then drop it on any section (even a collapsed one), like moving a file into a folder. Its whole branch comes along, and a selection moves together.
- Branches — break a note into sub-points up to ten levels deep, inline or
in a side panel.
Ctrl/Cmd+Bon the last note arms sub-branch mode so captures nest under it automatically. - Drawing pad —
+→ Create Drawing…: pen, line, arrow, rectangle, ellipse, and text, plus Move and an Eraser that removes whatever you drag across. Undo covers every step; Save drops it on the board as an image. - Save to Obsidian — right-click → Save to Obsidian writes Markdown into your current vault, one file per section, images included.
- Zoom —
Ctrl/Cmd++/-/0, 50–200%, remembered between launches. - Themes — System / Light / Dark / Glass. Glass is a translucent
liquid-glass look built on each OS's cheapest compositor effect: Windows DWM
acrylic, macOS
NSVisualEffectViewvibrancy (GPU-composited, effectively free). Linux gets plain translucency; KWin or picom can blur it. - Tray app — closes to the tray, optional start-at-login, single-instance.
- Your data stays yours — one SQLite file, plus one-click Export to Markdown so nothing is ever locked in.
Prerequisites: Rust, Node 18+, and the
Tauri 2 platform prerequisites
(WebView2 on Windows — preinstalled on Win 11; libwebkit2gtk-4.1 etc. on
Linux).
npm install
npm run tauri dev # run in development
npm run tauri build # produce installers/bundles for your OSIf you plan to publish a binary you built yourself, strip your own paths out
of it first. Rust bakes dependency source paths into panic messages, and
strip does not remove them, so an ordinary build embeds your home directory
several hundred times over:
RUSTFLAGS="--remap-path-prefix=$HOME=/build" npm run tauri buildCI already does this. (Cargo's own trim-paths would be tidier, but it is still
nightly-only.)
One Tauri 2 codebase (Rust core + web UI in the OS webview) compiles to a ~10 MB native binary on every platform. No Electron.
- macOS — the double-shift shortcuts use a low-level event tap, which needs the Accessibility permission (one checkbox: it covers both watching for the Shift taps and sending the copy chord). Without it the fallback hotkeys still work. Ticking the box takes effect immediately — no relaunch. Cooper shows a short setup guide whenever it detects the shortcuts are inert. Because the released builds are unsigned, macOS treats every Cooper update as a different app and silently drops the permission while leaving the checkbox visibly ticked. If double-shift stops after an update, remove Cooper from the Accessibility list with − and add it back. Cooper notices this and reopens the guide by itself.
- Linux — the raw keyboard hook works on X11; on Wayland use the fallback hotkeys.
- Capture mechanics — capturing simulates the platform copy chord and reads the clipboard. If nothing was selected, your previous clipboard is restored untouched.
- Database:
cooper.dbin the app data directory (%APPDATA%/app.cooper.desktopon Windows,~/Library/Application Support/app.cooper.desktopon macOS,~/.local/share/app.cooper.desktopon Linux). ⋯ → Export to Markdownwrites a checklist-stylecooper-export.mdto your Documents folder.
Apache-2.0 — fork it, ship it, build on it.