A warm, powerful clipboard manager for macOS. Card-based history, smart content detection, a built-in screenshot editor, dock preview, AI-powered text transformations — all local, open source, and free.
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New in 1.0.14 — ask your clipboard questions in plain language, grab text from any region of your screen, reusable templates, and a real keyboard flow. See what changed →
Contents — Why Clippy? · Features · Highlights · Settings · Installation · Shortcuts · Privacy
Everything you copy — text, images, code, colors, URLs — lives on briefly in your clipboard and is gone. Clippy keeps it all, in a beautiful menu bar history you can search, star, pin, and paste with a hotkey.
Then it goes further: ask it questions in plain language, lift text out of any screenshot or region of your screen, annotate images, convert files, and transform text with local or cloud AI.
All on your Mac. No accounts. No cloud. No telemetry.
| 📋 Smart clipboard history — content-aware previews for text, URLs, colors, JSON, code and images | |
| 💬 Ask your clipboard — "what was that phone number?" Ask in plain language, get the answer with its sources |  |
| 🔍 Searchable screenshots — auto-OCR reads every image on-device, so you can search text you only ever saw in a picture |  |
| 🎯 Smart detection — phones, emails, dates, addresses and sensitive data (cards, IBANs, API keys) become one-tap actions |  |
| ✍️ Screenshot editor — Studio Bar, context-aware Inspector, 20+ annotation tools |  |
| ⚡ Quick Preview — hit the hotkey, paste from your recent items in a floating overlay |  |
| ✨ AI transformations — summarize, translate, fix grammar, explain code. Local via Ollama or cloud |  |
| 🪟 Dock Preview — Windows 11–style thumbnails with live streaming and numbered badges |  |
| 🧩 Snippets that type themselves — save reusable text with a keyword, summon it anywhere |  |
- 🔎 Screen Text Grab — press ⇧⌘2, drag over any region of your screen, and the text inside it lands in your clipboard
- 📐 Templates — Clippy spots text you copy repeatedly and offers to turn it into a reusable template
- 📱 Send to Phone — any link becomes a QR code you can scan
- 🏷 Automatic titles — every item gets a short, readable name
- 🔤 Live Text — select text right on any screenshot, just like Photos
- 🌍 Language badges — screenshots are tagged with their detected language
- 🎯 Hover actions — Paste, Star, Pin and AI transform appear the moment you need them
- 🗂 File Converter — images, documents, audio, video, data formats
- 📦 Shelf — a drawer for files you need handy across apps
- 🔐 Encrypted items & per-type filters — lock sensitive entries, filter by type
Every copy is captured and rendered intelligently:
- Text shows its source app, time, and the first few lines
- URLs get a host chip + full URL preview
- Colors show a live swatch + HEX
- Code renders with a language chip and mono font
- JSON collapses structure into one line
- Images display as full-bleed thumbnails with dimensions
Hover any card to reveal transform, star, pin, and paste actions.
Stop scrolling for that one thing you copied. Ask for it:
"what was that phone number" · "the link from yesterday" · "my pinned items"
Clippy works out what you're asking for — timeframe, content type, which app it came from — ranks your history by meaning rather than keyword overlap, and shows the answer alongside the items it used.
Concrete values are pulled verbatim from the original text instead of being retyped by a model, so a phone number is always the number you actually copied.
Works with local models through Ollama or with a cloud provider, and falls back to on-device matching when no model is configured.
Copy any image and Clippy reads the text inside it in the background — on-device, private, and free. Search for a word you only ever saw in a screenshot and it comes right up. Powered by Apple Vision, it recognizes 30+ languages automatically with no setup.
Press ⇧⌘2, drag over any region of your screen, and the text inside it goes straight to your clipboard. Text in a video, a PDF that won't let you select, a screenshot someone sent you — if you can see it, you can copy it. QR codes in the selection are decoded too.
Handy for:
- text in a video or a slide someone is presenting
- a PDF that refuses to let you select
- a screenshot sent to you in chat
- an error dialog you'd otherwise retype by hand
Clippy spots actionable content — in both text and screenshots — and turns it into one-tap actions:
- 📞 Phone / ✉️ Email / 🔗 URL — tap to call, mail, or open
- 📅 Dates — add straight to Calendar
- 📍 Addresses — open in Maps
- 🔒 Sensitive data — credit cards, IBANs, API keys, and TC kimlik are detected (with checksum validation) and Clippy offers to encrypt them
The built-in editor has its own design language. Tool rail on the left, live canvas in the middle, context-aware Inspector on the right that shows either the active tool's properties or the selected annotation's details.
20+ tools, every one of them configurable live:
- Arrow with 5 arrowhead styles and 5 stroke patterns
- Text with bold/italic/alignment, contrast-aware backgrounds, box sizing
- Pen with 3 brush styles (solid/dashed/marker)
- Shapes with corner radius, fill modes, gradient
- Sketch mode for a hand-drawn look on arrows/rects/ellipses
- Blur, pixelate, spotlight, pin (numbered markers), emoji, magnifier, ruler
- Eyedropper with pixel-accurate loupe and 9 color-format copy options
- Effects: backdrop padding, shadow, corner radius, border, watermark
Hit the Quick Preview hotkey (default ⌘⌥V) anywhere to see the last
10 items in a floating panel. Number keys 1-9 paste directly, ↑↓
navigate, esc dismisses.
Run Summarize, Expand, Fix Grammar, Translate (30+ languages), Bullet Points, Draft Email, "Explain this" on a confusing error screenshot, and code-specific actions (Explain, Add Comments, Find Bugs, Optimize) on any clipboard item — text or screenshot.
Choose your provider:
- Apple Intelligence — on macOS 26+, the default. Runs entirely on-device, no API key, no signup, nothing leaves your Mac
- Ollama — fully local, free, private
- OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini — bring-your-own-key
There are text utilities built-in too: Base64 encode/decode, case conversion, JSON format/minify, duplicate-line removal, line joining.
Hover any app in the Dock to see Windows 11–style thumbnails — with numbered keyboard hints, inline title bars, and (optionally) live streaming at 5 FPS.
Save any text as a reusable snippet with a keyword. Type ;keyword
anywhere on your Mac — Clippy detects the trigger, deletes it, and
pastes the expanded content. Think TextExpander, but built in and free.
Each snippet gets its own detail window: keyword, app scope, template body, and live usage stats (how many times fired, last used).
Dynamic placeholders — resolved automatically at paste time:
| Placeholder | Expands to |
|---|---|
{{DATE}} |
Today's date, yyyy-MM-dd |
{{TIME}} |
Current time, HH:mm:ss |
{{DATETIME}} |
Combined, yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm |
{{UUID}} |
A new random UUID |
{{CLIPBOARD}} |
Your most recent clipboard text |
{{RANDOM:1-100}} |
Random integer in that range |
{{FILE:~/notes.txt}} |
Contents of a local file |
{{SHELL:date +%s}} |
Output of a shell command |
{{MY_NAME}} |
A custom variable defined in Settings → Snippets |
{{;other}} |
Expand another snippet by keyword (nested, up to 5 levels deep) |
Fill-in-the-blank parameters — prompt a quick form at paste time using single braces:
Hi {name},
Attached is invoice #{number:number} for {project:choice:Website,App,Consulting}.
Due date: {due:date}.
{signature=Best,\nMehmet}
Typing ;invoice pops up a short dialog with a text field, a number
input, a dropdown, a date picker, and a pre-filled signature. A live
Preview at the bottom shows the final text as you fill it in.
Press Paste — every placeholder is replaced inline and inserted
into the focused app.
Supported parameter types:
{name}, {name:text}, {name:number}, {name:date}, {name:time},
{name:choice:A,B,C}, plus {name=default} to pre-fill any of them.
Global variables — define reusable placeholders once in
Settings → Snippets → Variables ({{MY_NAME}}, {{MY_EMAIL}},
{{MY_COMPANY}} …) and reference them from any snippet. Change a
variable once, every snippet picks up the new value.
App-scoped — tie a snippet to specific apps (e.g. Mail + Outlook)
so ;signature only fires where you want it.
Nested composition — build longer templates out of smaller snippets
({{;greeting}} + {{;signature}} inside a bigger email body).
Usage-aware — Clippy tracks how often each snippet fires, so you can see your power-users at a glance from the detail inspector.
Type to filter instantly. The placeholder adapts to the active tab (Search clipboard… / Search snippets… / Search images…) so you always know what you're searching.
Pinned items float above the Recent stream so you never lose what matters — including Clippy's Encrypted content entries for anything sensitive.
Star anything you want to keep long-term and jump to the Starred tab to see only those.
Tabs at the top narrow the list to a single content type — All, Images, Snippets, Starred.
Every card has a rich context menu: copy, paste, share, convert color format, star, pin, encrypt, combine images, delete.
Click any item to open its detail window. Left: persistent action rail (star, pin, encrypt, share, delete). Center: rich editor. Right: context-aware inspector (keyword, app scope, usage stats).
Different content types get different treatments — JSON gets a tree view, a Valid-JSON badge, and a Raw toggle.
Colors get a dedicated card with a glowing swatch and a one-tap Copy menu that converts between HEX, RGB, HSL formats.
Every item gets a short, readable title, so your history scans at a glance instead of showing you the first 40 characters of a URL. Titles are searchable, and the whole thing can be switched off in Settings → Features.
Open any screenshot in the detail window and select the text right on the image — just like Photos. Copy it, tap links, done. Language flags tell you what Clippy detected at a glance.
Clippy notices when you copy the same shape of text again and again — invoice lines, ticket references, standup notes — and offers to turn it into a template with the variable parts filled in. You review the suggestion before anything is saved, and dismissing it keeps Clippy quiet.
For example, after you copy a few of these:
INV-2026-0142 · Acme Ltd · €1,240.00 · due 2026-08-15
INV-2026-0143 · Globex · €880.00 · due 2026-08-18
Clippy offers a template with the parts that change turned into fields:
INV-{number} · {company} · €{amount} · due {date}
Right-click any link → Send to Phone. A QR code appears; point your camera at it and the link opens over there. No pairing, no account, no network round trip.
Drag files in, pick output formats, convert in batch:
- Image: PNG, JPEG, TIFF, BMP, GIF, HEIC, WEBP, PDF
- Document: RTF, HTML, TXT, PDF, Markdown, DOCX
- Audio: M4A, WAV, AAC, AIFF, MP3, FLAC, CAF
- Video: MOV, MP4, M4V, AVI
- Data: JSON, YAML, XML, CSV, PLIST
A dedicated drawer for files you want to keep around across apps — downloads, attachments, mockups, PDFs. Drag files onto the shelf from anywhere; drag them back out when you need them. Shown with type pills (PDF / ZIP / folder / image dimensions) and batch actions.
Everything is configurable from a single NavigationSplitView-based Settings window — General, Features, AI, Shortcuts, Snippets, Windows, Privacy, About.
Launch at login, theme, popover size, visible tabs, auto-update checks.
Fine-grained toggles: auto code detection, content detection, duplicate skip, source-app tracking, screenshot editor, OCR, file converter, drag-drop shelf, Quick Preview.
Pick a provider (Ollama, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini), paste your API key, choose a model, test the connection. Available actions at the bottom tell you exactly what Clippy will offer on your cards.
Rebind every hotkey — Show/Hide, Paste Selected, Quick Preview, Sequential Copy/Paste, Clear Queue, Screenshot, App Switcher.
Tune the Dock Preview: animation style, preview size, hover delay, trackpad gestures, window caching, max cache size.
- Grab the latest
.dmgfrom Releases - Double-click, drag Clippy.app to
/Applications - Launch — a short onboarding walks you through setup
Clippy ships with Sparkle. New versions are checked in the background every 24 hours, or on demand via Settings → General → Check Now. Updates are cryptographically signed (EdDSA) so only the real Clippy can push them to your install.
git clone https://github.com/yarasaa/Clippy.git
cd Clippy
open Clippy.xcodeproj
# Product → Run (⌘R) in XcodeRequirements: macOS 13+, Xcode 16+, Swift 5.9+.
All rebindable from Settings → Shortcuts.
| Action | Default |
|---|---|
| Show/Hide Clippy popover | ⌘⇧V |
| Quick Preview overlay | ⌘⌥V |
| Paste All selected | ⌘⏎ |
| Sequential Copy | ⌘⇧C |
| Sequential Paste | ⌘⇧V (overridden) |
| Take Screenshot | ⌘⇧S |
| Screen Text Grab | ⇧⌘2 |
| App Switcher | ⌘⇥ (when enabled) |
| Action | Key |
|---|---|
| Move through history | ↑ ↓ |
| Paste the selected item | ⏎ |
| Paste item 1–9 directly | ⌘1–⌘9 |
| Move focus between search and list | ⇥ |
| Close | esc |
Search doesn't take focus when the popover opens, so the number shortcuts work the moment Clippy appears.
Quick Preview overlay has its own nav keys — 1-9 to paste, ↑↓ to
move, esc to dismiss.
Clippy stores everything on your Mac, in CoreData, under your user account.
- No network calls except for:
- Optional AI transformations (only if you enable them and only to the provider you choose — Ollama runs fully local)
- Auto-update checks to
raw.githubusercontent.com/yarasaa/Clippy
- No analytics, telemetry, or account system
- Source app tracking can be disabled in Settings → Features
- Encrypted items — lock sensitive clipboard entries so they show up as "Encrypted content" until you authenticate
See PRIVACY.md (coming soon) for the full breakdown.
Clippy is open source and community contributions are very welcome.
- Bugs / feature requests: GitHub Issues
- Code contributions: fork, branch, PR against
main - Larger changes: open an issue first to discuss direction
Releasing (maintainers only) — see docs/SPARKLE_SETUP.md.
- Sparkle for the auto-update framework
- HotKey for global keyboard shortcuts
- Ollama, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google for AI access
- Everyone who filed bugs, tested builds, and pushed for the Ember redesign
If Clippy makes your life easier, a coffee keeps it going:
MIT — see LICENSE.