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Using Clipped

Opening the panel​

Press ⌥C (Option + C) from anywhere, or click the clipboard icon in your menu bar. The panel opens beneath the menu bar, focused on the search field.

Option-click the menu bar icon to open a quick menu instead — pause/resume monitoring, clear history, open settings, or quit.

Full history window​

For longer browsing sessions, press ⌥⇧C (Option + Shift + C) to open the full history window. It's a standalone three-pane browser — a category sidebar on the left, the item list in the middle, and a detail pane on the right — good for reviewing, searching, and cleaning up your history. Both shortcuts are rebindable in Settings → General → Keyboard shortcuts.

Clipboard history​

Every copy is added to your history automatically. Items appear in reverse chronological order, with Pinned items shown above Recent items. Each row shows a preview, the source app icon, a timestamp, and a badge if a transformation was applied.

Start typing to search. Clipped matches against the content of each item (including the plain-text fallback of rich text and the URLs of links).

Use ↑ / ↓ or Tab / ⇧Tab to move the selection. Press Return to copy the selected item back to the clipboard, then paste it with ⌘V in your target app. Escape clears the selection, then clears the search, then closes the panel.

Filters​

Above the list, the filter bar lets you pivot the history by category. The All tab is always available; every other tab can be toggled on or off in Settings → General → Filter tabs.

Content type

  • Text — plain text and rich text combined
  • URL — links (with fetched page titles and favicons where available)
  • Image — copied images, screenshots, and SVG markup rendered as thumbnails
  • Dev — a meta-filter for developer content: UUIDs, JSON, code blocks, hex hashes, JWTs, and absolute file paths

Smart categories (off by default — enable in Settings)

  • Email — items containing an email address
  • Phone — items containing a phone number
  • Color — items containing a #RRGGBB hex colour
  • Number — amounts, percentages, currency values

Smart categories overlap freely with other tabs: copying "Email me at foo@bar.com" makes that item visible under both Text and Email.

Source app (off by default — enable in Settings)

  • Chat — Slack, Messages, Mail, Teams, Discord, Telegram, WhatsApp, Zoom…
  • Browser — Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Arc, Edge, Vivaldi, Opera…
  • Editor — Xcode, VS Code, Cursor, Sublime, JetBrains, Zed, Nova…
  • Terminal — Terminal, iTerm2, Alacritty, kitty, WezTerm, Warp…

Source-app tabs bucket items by where they were copied from, using a maintained list of bundle identifiers.

Pinning items​

Right-click any item and choose Pin to keep it at the top of the panel regardless of age. Right-click again and choose Unpin to remove it. Pinned items survive Clear All.

Pasting​

  • Return (in the panel): copies the item back to the clipboard. Paste manually with ⌘V.
  • Right-click → Paste: Clipped copies the item and then synthesises a ⌘V into the frontmost app. Useful for power users, but aborted automatically if focus changes during the paste.
  • Right-click → Paste as plain text: strips formatting before pasting.
  • Right-click → Copy as Markdown (rich text only): converts RTF to Markdown first.

Transformations​

Clipped can automatically rewrite items as they're copied. Enabled by default:

  • Strip tracking parameters from URLs (utm_*, fbclid, gclid, …)
  • Trim whitespace from plain text

Available but off by default:

  • Clean Amazon links (shorten to /dp/ASIN)
  • Smart quotes → straight quotes
  • Collapse multiple spaces
  • Strip rich text to plain text
  • Convert rich text to Markdown
  • Strip ANSI escape codes
  • Detect code snippets (tags them for the Dev filter)

Mutated items show a ✦ badge. Right-click and choose Restore original to undo a transformation for that item. Global rules live in Settings → Transformations; you can override any rule per source app in Settings → App rules.

Sticky notes​

Right-click any item and choose Open as sticky note to pop it out as a small floating window you can leave anywhere on your desktop. Sticky notes stay on top and persist until you close them.

Export​

The export button in the panel's bottom bar merges every visible item (respecting your current search and filter) into a single clipboard payload, separated by ---. Handy for collecting a batch of snippets into one paste.

Clearing history​

Click Clear All in the bottom bar. An Undo button appears for three seconds in case you change your mind. Pinned items are preserved unless you explicitly delete them from their context menu.

Multiple displays​

The panel opens attached to the menu bar on whichever display contains the menu bar icon.