PasteRich

A lightweight, cross-platform background daemon for converting raw Markdown to Rich Text on the fly.

PasteRich solves a massive friction point for developers: copying Markdown documentation, snippets, or AI outputs, and needing to paste them into enterprise applications (Microsoft Word, Outlook, Teams, Google Docs) without losing formatting.

Instead of running a heavy Electron application, PasteRich operates as an ultra-lightweight background system daemon. Copy any raw markdown text, hit your global hotkey, and PasteRich will instantly convert it to HTML/RTF, inject it into your OS clipboard, and seamlessly paste it directly into your active window.

• 🖥️ Cross-Platform Native Clipboards: Supports Windows (CF_HTML), macOS (NSPasteboard via RTF), and Linux (xclip/xsel).
• 🪶 Zero-Overhead Daemon: Runs silently in the system tray. Absolutely no heavy frontend frameworks.
• ⌨️ Dynamic Hotkey GUI: Change your global shortcut instantly via a native UI popup. No app restarts required!
• 🔄 Auto-Updates: Built-in update checker directly from GitHub releases with seamless one-click downloads.
• 🚀 First-Run Welcome Screen: Clean UI on first launch showing your current hotkey and instructions.
• 🚀 Auto-Start: Built-in support to register itself to run on system boot.
• 🎨 Smart CSS Styling: Uses GitHub's aesthetic for tables, blockquotes, and text.
• 🧑‍💻 Code Highlighting: Full syntax highlighting for code blocks via Pygments (Defaults to Monokai).
• 🧠 Smart Pass-Through: If the clipboard doesn't contain Markdown, the hotkey acts exactly like a normal paste!

The easiest way to use PasteRich is to download the standalone compiled executable from the Releases page. No installation required!

Launch PasteRich. A purple clipboard icon will appear in your system tray/menu bar.

Copy any text containing Markdown elements (e.g. **bold**, # headers, or ```python).

Switch to your target application (Word, Outlook, etc.) and press the global hotkey:

• Windows & Linux: F8 (Default)
• macOS: F8 (Default)

The markdown will be rendered as beautiful rich text instantly!

You can dynamically change your hotkey by right-clicking the tray icon and selecting Change Hotkey. You can also manually Check for Updates or Refresh Hotkey from this menu.

For advanced configuration, PasteRich creates a config.json in the same directory as the executable.

{
    "hotkey": "f8",
    "theme": "monokai"
}

Want to customize how your pasted tables, fonts, or blockquotes look? Simply create a file named style.css in the same directory as PasteRich. If detected, PasteRich will automatically use your custom CSS instead of the default GitHub theme!

If you want to compile the executable yourself, PasteRich is built entirely in Python using PyInstaller.

1. Clone the repository and setup your environment:

git clone https://github.com/RamonRiosJr/PasteRich.git
cd PasteRich
python -m venv venv

2. Activate the virtual environment:

• Windows: .\venv\Scripts\activate
• macOS/Linux: source venv/bin/activate

3. Install requirements and compile:

pip install -r requirements.txt
python build.py

The compiled, standalone binary will be generated in the /dist directory.

PasteRich is written in strictly-typed Python (pasterich.py). We welcome pull requests for new themes, extended markdown support, or OS-specific optimizations!

Distributed under the MIT License. See LICENSE for more information.