A macOS menu bar utility for cleaning terminal-copied text.

Scrubadub strips terminal-width padding, ANSI escape codes, excess outer blank lines, and other paste noise from Claude Code CLI output and similar right-padded terminal text.

Paste text into the menu bar app, and Scrubadub puts the cleaned version back on your clipboard. The Homebrew install also includes a scrubadub CLI for shell pipelines.

Scrubadub requires macOS 14 or newer.

Homebrew Cask is the recommended install path:

brew install --cask steven-haddix/tap/scrubadub

You can also download the zipped app from the latest GitHub release.

The cask installs:

• Scrubadub.app, the menu bar app.
• scrubadub, the command-line cleaner.

If you installed with Homebrew:

brew uninstall --cask scrubadub

If you installed from a GitHub release, quit Scrubadub and delete Scrubadub.app from Applications.

1. Launch Scrubadub from Applications.
2. Click the menu bar icon.
3. Paste terminal output into the Scrubadub window.
4. Paste anywhere else. Your clipboard now contains the cleaned text.

Scrubadub also has an optional clipboard watcher in Settings. When enabled, it silently rewrites the clipboard only when the copied text looks like padded terminal output.

The CLI reads UTF-8 text from standard input, writes cleaned text to standard output, and prints cleanup stats to standard error.

pbpaste | scrubadub | pbcopy

You can also clean a file:

scrubadub < messy-output.txt > clean-output.txt

Check the installed version or show CLI help:

scrubadub --version
scrubadub --help

Always:

• Trailing whitespace on every line.

Default-on:

• ANSI escape codes, including color sequences, OSC sequences, and charset switches.
• Outer blank lines at the beginning and end of the paste.
• Common left padding from every non-empty line.
• Hard-wrapped prose rejoined into normal paragraphs.

Default-off:

• Collapse long runs of blank lines.
• Strip box-drawing borders and leading gutter characters.

The menu bar app exposes these settings in the gear menu. The CLI currently uses the default cleaner options.

Scrubadub stands on two prior efforts worth checking out on their own:

• Trimmy by Peter Steinberger — a tightly-focused macOS menu bar utility that shaped what I wanted Scrubadub to feel like to use.
• cleanup-claude-code-paste by Simon Willison — a post that named the exact padded-terminal-paste pain I'd been hitting and sketched a fix.

Scrubadub combines those ideas into a native macOS menu bar app and a brew-installable Unix-pipeable CLI, local-only and telemetry-free. Thanks to both for putting their work out where I could learn from it.

If macOS blocks the downloaded app, install with Homebrew or open System Settings > Privacy & Security and allow the app from there.

If scrubadub is not found after installing the cask, make sure Homebrew's binary directory is on your PATH:

brew --prefix

Then check that the cask installed correctly:

brew list --cask scrubadub

Scrubadub is a Swift Package that requires Swift 6 and macOS 14 or newer.

git clone https://github.com/steven-haddix/scrub-a-dub.git
cd scrub-a-dub
swift test
swift run Scrubadub

Run the CLI from source:

pbpaste | swift run scrubadub | pbcopy

Build without launching:

swift build

Sources/
  ScrubadubCore/   Pure cleaning library with no I/O or UI
  Scrubadub/       SwiftUI menu bar app
  scrubadub-cli/   stdin to cleaned stdout command
Tests/
  ScrubadubCoreTests/

ScrubadubCore.Cleaner.clean(input, options:) -> CleanResult is a pure function. Both the app and CLI call it, so cleaner behavior should be covered in ScrubadubCoreTests.

Small fixes are welcome. A good pull request usually includes:

• A clear description of the user-facing behavior being changed.
• Focused tests when cleaner behavior changes.
• Screenshots or notes for visible app changes.
• Conventional commit-style PR titles, such as fix: preserve whitespace in code blocks or docs: clarify Homebrew installation.

Before opening a PR, run:

swift test

Release packaging lives in Scripts/, and the manual GitHub Actions release flow is documented in docs/release.md.

Scripts/package_app.sh release

That creates a zipped .app, a SHA256 file, and a generated Homebrew cask at dist/homebrew/scrubadub.rb.