A lightweight, native macOS clipboard manager.
One hotkey. Instant popup. Text, images, and files. No subscription.
A personal fork of weiykong/ClipHistory with a few opinionated tweaks.
Weiyuan Kong built a genuinely lovely clipboard manager - fast, native, encrypted, no telemetry. All the real work is theirs, and the original project has the full feature list, the architecture notes, and the design rationale. Go read it there; I haven't copied it here.
However, I'm a prissy little designer, so I rearranged the furniture to suit my taste:
- A bottom-tray mode. A full-width tray that rises from the bottom of the screen, showing clips as large horizontal preview cards you scan with
←/→. It's the default now; the classic centred popup is still a setting away. - Files, not just text and images. Copy files in Finder and they land in your history — paste drops the real files back, with a thumbnail preview for images.
- Paste keeps your formatting.
↵pastes with the original styling;⇧↵pastes as plain text. Styled clips also preview with their real bold, italics, and colour. - A redesigned, quieter popup. A Liquid Glass background, no branding header or toolbar buttons — it opens straight into search, with a cleaner type scale and legible keyboard hints.
- Open it where you want. Bottom tray, centre, top, bottom, or at the cursor — set the popup's position in Settings.
- Keyboard-first pin and delete.
⌘Ppins the selected item,⌘⌫deletes it, without reaching for the mouse. - A quieter menu bar. Hide the menu bar icon entirely and reach Settings from the gear button in the popup.
- The shortcut recorder works. Fixed a bug where you couldn't change the hotkey in Settings.
Everything underneath — capture, AES-256-GCM encryption, search, per-app exclusions, sensitive-data skipping — is the original's, unchanged.
This fork has no prebuilt release — build it from source:
git clone https://github.com/jmstach/ClipHistory.git
cd ClipHistory
bash scripts/build-dmg.sh # → dist/ClipHistory.dmgOpen dist/ClipHistory.dmg, drag ClipHistory.app to /Applications, and grant Accessibility permission when the onboarding screen asks — it's needed for the hotkey and the popup's keyboard navigation.
Requires macOS 14 Sonoma or later, and Xcode Command Line Tools (xcode-select --install).
Sharing the built app with someone else? Because it isn't notarised, macOS quarantines it when copied to another Mac. They clear it once after dragging it to
/Applications:xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/ClipHistory.app
| Action | Shortcut |
|---|---|
| Open popup | ⌘⇧V (customisable in Settings) |
| Navigate | ↑ / ↓ (or ← / → in bottom-tray mode) |
| Paste (with formatting) | ↵ |
| Paste as plain text | ⇧↵ |
| Search | Just start typing |
| Pin / unpin item | ⌘P (or the pin button on the selected item) |
| Delete item | ⌘⌫ (or the trash button on the selected item) |
| Close | Esc or click outside |
| Settings | Gear button in the popup (or the menu bar icon, if shown) |
ClipHistory is the work of Weiyuan Kong — this fork only changes a handful of interactions. For everything else, including how it actually works, see the original repository.
MIT © 2026 Weiyuan Kong