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Getting started with Clipped

Clipped is a lightweight, native clipboard manager for macOS. It lives in your menu bar and keeps a searchable history of everything you copy — text, rich text, links, images, and code — so you never lose something you copied earlier.

Requirements​

  • macOS 15.0 (Sequoia) or later
  • Apple Silicon or Intel

Installation​

Homebrew (recommended):

brew install mcclowes/clipped/clipped

Manual download: Grab the latest Clipped.zip from GitHub Releases, unzip, and drag Clipped to your Applications folder.

First launch​

Launch Clipped from Applications. It appears as a clipboard icon in your menu bar — there's no Dock icon and no main window. A multi-step welcome window walks you through the basics on first run, and your history is seeded with one example item per content type so the panel isn't empty before you've copied anything.

Clipped doesn't require Accessibility permissions to work. If you later enable "Capture screenshots to history," you'll be prompted once to grant read-only access to your screenshots folder.

Basic usage​

  • Copy anything as you normally would (⌘C). Clipped captures it automatically.
  • Open Clipped with the global shortcut (default: ⌥C — Option + C), or click the menu bar icon.
  • Search by typing. The search field is focused when the panel opens.
  • Navigate with ↑ / ↓ (or Tab / ⇧Tab).
  • Return copies the selected item back to the clipboard so you can paste it with ⌘V. Right-click an item and choose Paste to have Clipped paste it directly into the frontmost app.

What gets captured​

Clipped stores:

  • Plain text
  • Rich text (RTF)
  • URLs (with automatic page-title previews)
  • Images, including screenshots (opt-in)

By default, Clipped keeps the last 100 items. You can raise this to 250 or 500 (or lower it to 10/25/50) in Settings. Persisted history is encrypted on disk with a Keychain-held key.

Secure mode​

Clipped detects password-manager entries and, by default, skips them entirely so they never enter your history. You can change this to auto-expire them after 10, 30, or 60 seconds in Settings → General → Security.

Next steps​