ClipWatch Download

macOS app · free

Everything you copy,
back in a keystroke.

Your Mac forgets what you copied the moment you copy the next thing. ClipWatch keeps it — in a strip along the bottom of the screen, a shortcut away, with the things you use constantly pinned where you can find them.

Download for macOS How it works

Free · macOS 14+ · signed and notarized by Apple

Wherever you were typing

Dear Rowan,
Thanks for the notes —

Press ⇧⌘V anywhere, then pick one or click a card

A strip, not a list.

Press the shortcut and the last few hundred things you copied come up along the bottom of the screen. Every card is coloured by what it is, so you find the one you want by shape and colour before you have finished reading — and ⌘1 through ⌘9 paste the first nine without touching the mouse.

Text and code

The paragraph, the command, the token you pasted an hour ago. Search finds a fragment from the middle of a word, not just the start.

Links

Shown with the page's real title rather than a slug, so a list of URLs reads like a list of pages. Switchable off — it is the only network call the app makes.

Images and files

Screenshots and files, kept as themselves. Drag one straight out of the strip into Slack, Finder, or an image well.

The things you paste every day belong somewhere.

Pinboards are for what you reach for constantly — a signature, a licence header, the address you type twenty times a week. Drag a card onto a board and it stops being history and starts being a library.

Nothing on a pinboard is ever swept away

History is cleared out as it grows — by age, by count, or when you clear it by hand. A pinboard is exempt from all of it. That is the promise the whole design is built around, and the app refuses anything that would break it.

Reachable by number

⌘0 is the clipboard, then ⇧⌘1 onwards for your boards in the order they sit in the tab bar. Drag a tab to change its number — which is how you decide which board gets the shortcut worth having.

Type ::sig. Get your signature.

Give any snippet on a pinboard a short trigger and it expands wherever you type — mail, an editor, a terminal, a chat box. Around 2,400 emoji names come with it, including the shorthands you already know.

  • Off until you turn it on — it is the one part of the app that watches what you type
  • The prefix is yours: :: by default, because a single colon collides with 10:30
  • Name apps it should never fire in
  • Nothing is recorded: the few characters it holds live in memory and are dropped at every space

It sees everything you copy. So it is built to be trusted with it.

A clipboard manager is the most sensitive app on the machine by definition. This one is sandboxed, has no account, no server and no sync, and everything it keeps stays on your Mac.

Passwords are refused, out of the box

Copies from password managers are never stored, and neither is anything an app marks as concealed — before you configure a thing. Text that looks like a generated secret is skipped too.

One network call, and you can switch it off

Fetching the title of a link you just copied is the only thing that leaves the machine. There is nothing else to send, because there is nowhere to send it.

Your clipboard, readable by the tools you already use.

ClipWatch is also an MCP server, so Claude, Cursor and the rest can search your history and read a snippet when you ask them to. It is read-mostly on purpose: nothing deletes, and nothing writes to your system clipboard — an assistant quietly replacing what is under your ⌘V has no way to ask first.

Stop losing the thing you copied a minute ago.

Everything you copy, a keystroke away — with the snippets you use constantly pinned, and typed back with three characters.

Download ClipWatch Get help

Free · macOS 14+ · Apple silicon and Intel · signed and notarized

The things worth asking first.

Where does my clipboard history live?

In a database inside the app's own container on your Mac, and nowhere else. There is no account and no server. Images are kept as files alongside it so the strip stays fast no matter how much has gone through it.

Does it keep passwords?

No. Copies from password managers are refused out of the box, as is anything an app marks as concealed. Text that looks like a generated secret is skipped as well — that check errs towards keeping ordinary text, because silently losing something you wanted is worse than an entry you can delete.

Why does it ask for Accessibility?

Only to paste for you. Without it, picking a card copies the item and you press ⌘V yourself — everything else works exactly the same. Text expansion is the one feature that genuinely cannot work without it, and the app says so rather than offering a switch that does nothing.

How much does it keep?

Everything, until you tell it otherwise. You can cap the history by number of items or by age; anything on a pinboard is exempt from both.

Is it really free?

Yes. Free, signed and notarized by Apple, and it updates itself.

Built with AI

I built ClipWatch with heavy use of AI coding tools.

Saying so seems more useful than leaving you to guess.