Windows-only scope, working hotkeys, and unspooling that pastes

[willkotheimer]

Three things, found by using the app rather than by reading it: two of the four hotkeys never worked, Clear spools did nothing in the common case, and serving a clip made you press Ctrl+V yourself.

Two of the four hotkeys were dead on most machines

Probing all twenty-six Win+Alt+<letter> combinations on Windows 11 found thirteen already owned by other applications:

TAKEN: A B D F G K M N R S T W Y
free:  E H I J L O P Q U X Z

N is OneNote's Quick Note. M, R, G, B, T and W belong to the Xbox Game Bar, which ships with Windows — so Win+Alt+M was not unlucky, it was dead for nearly every Windows 11 user. Registration had been failing honestly the whole time and the tray had been reporting it, but nobody opens the tray to find out why a key they just pressed did nothing. That is precisely the outcome PLAN.md §8 was written to prevent.

The keys now say what they do:

Win+Alt+C	summon / dismiss — C for clipboard
Win+Alt+U	unspool the next clip
Win+Alt+V	paste the whole spool, the way Ctrl+V pastes one thing
mode pill	toggle FIFO / LIFO — no hotkey at all

Unspooling owns the repeat gesture: press U again and again and clips come off in the mode's order. That is why pasting everything is not a double-press of anything — a repeated press means "give me the next one", and spending it on "give me everything at once" would hand the unspool gesture to the one action that makes the ordering moot. Toggling the mode loses its global key entirely; it is something you do while looking at the spool, not while typing somewhere else.

But no default can be right on every machine, because which combinations are free depends on what else is installed. So the real fix is the rebinding UI §8 asked for and never got: the ? button opens it, carries a count badge when the OS refuses a key, and the footer strikes through any dead binding. Rebinding is two dropdowns and an attempt rather than "press what you want", because the Windows shell eats Win-key presses before a renderer ever sees them. Ctrl+Alt is offered but is not the default — it measured completely free here and is AltGr abroad, where Ctrl+Alt+C types ć.

Clear spools counted a spool it then refused to touch

clearSpoolsLabel counted every unstarred spool including the active one; clearSpools filtered the active one out. With a single unstarred spool that happened to be active, the button said "Clear 1 spool" and did nothing. It now clears the active spool and falls back to the default, because the button states what it spares and must not spare something it does not name.

Serving now pastes

PLAN.md §8 had rejected serve-and-paste, but the reason was entirely a macOS one: synthesizing input there needs Accessibility permission — permission to read every keystroke — and an app whose claim is that it cannot spy on you must not ask for it. Windows SendInput is output, not input: no permission, no elevation, no keyboard hook. The objection does not reach this platform.

Its three secondary arguments survived the change rather than opposing it. No hook is needed. The clip stays on the clipboard, so serve-once-paste-into-four-places still works — this adds the first paste rather than removing the others. And the cursor still advances because the user pressed a key.

The addon gains sendPaste, which refuses when Spool's own window is in front, since pasting into ourselves is never what anyone meant. It is a setting rather than a law, because a synthesized Ctrl+V does nothing in terminals that paste with Ctrl+Shift+V. No new dependency — extending the addon we already own keeps the surface the zero-network gate checks exactly as narrow as it was.

Scope: this is a Windows application

macOS is dropped. It costs an Apple Developer membership, a Mac to notarize from, and a second native clipboard implementation, to reach a platform this was never being built for — and the Microsoft Store asks nothing about it. Being Windows-only is what makes the paste above defensible, so the two decisions are recorded together. M14 is marked dropped.

Store tiles

electron-builder substitutes placeholder tiles when build/appx is empty, and those placeholders are the Electron logo — the package built cleanly and would have reached the Store carrying someone else's mark. The six assets are drawn from the same geometry and palette as build/icon.ico. STORE.md records what Partner Center must supply, why the Store build keeps the zero-network guarantee where an auto-updater would not, and that arm64 needs the ARM64 MSVC toolset.

Verification

393 tests, typecheck, lint, and the zero-network gate pass. Beyond that, in the running app: both artifacts rebuilt, the installer installed, all three hotkeys confirmed live, and Win+Alt+U pressed three times returned alpha clip, beta clip, gamma clip in FIFO order, with Win+Alt+V then joining the whole spool. Paste-into-another-window was confirmed by spool text appearing in a window it was never typed into.

Still open: the MSIX has not been installed and run, which needs Developer Mode or a trusted certificate — both require administrator rights.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code