The moment you copy something new and lose what you copied two minutes ago is the moment you realise the Mac clipboard was never designed for the way you actually work. Clipy fixes that permanently, and it does it for free.
What is Clipy?
Clipy is a free, open-source menu-bar utility for macOS that maintains a rolling history of everything you copy — text, URLs, and images — and pairs it with a fully editable snippet library for content you paste on repeat. Both features live under a single menu-bar icon and are reachable from the keyboard without touching the mouse.
The project grew out of the vacuum left when ClipMenu, a beloved predecessor, was abandoned. Clipy carried that same unobtrusive philosophy forward in Swift: sit quietly, interrupt nothing, and be there the instant you need it. Within a day of installing it I stopped thinking of ⌘C as a destructive action. The history is always there. That alone changes how you work.
What does Clipy do best?
Clipy's defining strength is that it genuinely solves two problems at once without the bloat that usually accompanies dual-purpose tools.
The history side captures every clipboard entry and surfaces it as a nested, searchable menu. You can tune how many entries to retain and whether images are included alongside plaintext. The menu loads almost instantly even with hundreds of items queued — I've never waited for it.
The snippet side is where daily time savings compound. Snippets live in named folders you define, each assignable a direct keyboard shortcut. A three-key chord can drop a full email template, a boilerplate SQL clause, or a markdown frontmatter block wherever your cursor sits. I maintain a folder of client-facing phrases I used to type from scratch multiple times a day — it's the kind of low-drama automation that disappears into your muscle memory.
- Unlimited clipboard history with configurable retention depth
- Organised snippet folders with per-item keyboard shortcuts
- Image clipboard capture (screenshots, copied graphics)
- App-level exclusion rules to skip sensitive sources
- Inline search across the full history list
Is Clipy free?
Clipy is completely free — no subscription, no feature wall, no one-time purchase required. The full source is on GitHub, which means you can audit exactly what it does with your clipboard data before trusting it.
That openness comes with the honest caveat that Clipy is community-maintained rather than commercially backed. The preference panel looks like it predates macOS Ventura, active development is intermittent, and feature requests move slowly. For zero cost, though, the core functionality is rock-solid.
Who should use Clipy?
Clipy rewards anyone whose job involves repetitive text: developers copying stack traces between terminal and browser, support agents sending templated replies, researchers shuttling quotes from a PDF into notes, writers juggling multiple drafts across apps. If you catch yourself retyping the same thing more than twice a day, Clipy eliminates that entirely.
It makes less sense for users who need clipboard sync across an iPhone or a second Mac — Clipy is local-only. Teams sharing a snippet library collaboratively are better served by a shared wiki or a tool like Notion. And if you already run Raycast or Alfred with their clipboard-history modules active, you may find the overlap more confusing than useful, though plenty of people run Clipy alongside a launcher and keep the concerns separated.
What are the best Clipy alternatives?
Paste is the premium benchmark: a beautifully designed clipboard shelf with iCloud sync across Mac and iPhone, actively developed, subscription-priced. Worth it if cross-device access or a visual browsing interface matters to you. CopyClip 2 offers a lean, paid alternative with a simpler feature set. Raycast — free, and many power users' Spotlight replacement — bundles clipboard history natively, making it the most compelling reason to skip Clipy entirely if you're already in that ecosystem. Alfred's Powerpack adds comparable history and snippet features for Alfred loyalists. Among tools that cost nothing, Clipy remains the only option that pairs a deep history store with a properly structured snippet manager in a single lightweight package.
