Flycut is a free, open-source clipboard history manager for macOS that stores everything you copy and lets you paste any previous clipping instantly from a searchable stack.
What is Flycut?
Flycut is a lightweight macOS menubar utility that maintains a running history of everything you copy to the clipboard — text snippets, URLs, code fragments, terminal output, whatever — and surfaces them through a quick keyboard shortcut so you can paste any entry on demand. The project lives on GitHub under the MIT licence and is available at no cost through the Mac App Store as well as Homebrew Cask.
The concept is simple almost to the point of feeling obvious, yet the default macOS clipboard discards everything the moment you hit ⌘C again. Flycut fills that gap without ceremony: install it, set a shortcut (I use ⇧⌘V), and every copy action quietly accumulates in a bezel-style overlay you can arrow through. No accounts, no subscriptions, no analytics — just history.
What does Flycut do best?
Flycut excels at keeping code and text fragments instantly retrievable during focused development sessions. If you spend your day copying stack-trace snippets, API keys from a vault, SQL column names, and bash one-liners, the friction of reaching back three copies ago is genuinely disruptive — Flycut removes it.
The bezel overlay shows clippings in reverse-chronological order. Arrow keys navigate the stack; pressing Return pastes the selected entry. I particularly like that it handles multi-line content gracefully, which matters when you're copying function blocks or JSON payloads. You can configure the history depth — 40 entries is the default, bumped to 99 feels more useful in practice — and you can purge the stack manually when switching context to a sensitive project.
- Persistent clipboard history across app switches and restarts
- Keyboard-driven navigation — no mouse required
- Configurable stack depth (up to 99+ entries)
- Optional iCloud sync between Macs
- Open source — no black-box behaviour with your copied data
Is Flycut free?
Yes — Flycut is completely free. The Mac App Store listing carries no price, there is no in-app purchase, and the source code is openly auditable on GitHub. The project is community-maintained, which means it lacks a dedicated support tier, but the codebase is stable and the feature set has been consistent for years.
Who should use Flycut?
Developers are the primary audience, though any power user who spends significant time copying and pasting across windows will feel the benefit immediately. If you work across a terminal, an IDE, a browser, and a notes app simultaneously — which describes most backend engineers I know — you will recoup the thirty-second install time within the first hour.
Writers juggling research tabs, sysadmins composing command sequences, and anyone doing repetitive data-entry workflows will find it equally useful. Flycut is perhaps less compelling for people whose clipboard use is purely incidental — occasional copy-paste of a single item — but even then the downside is zero, since the app consumes almost no memory and hides away in the menubar otherwise.
What are the best Flycut alternatives?
The strongest alternatives in the clipboard-manager category are Pasta, Maccy, and CleanMyMac's clipboard history. Pasta offers a gorgeous visual grid layout and richer organisation features but carries a paid licence. Maccy is arguably Flycut's closest open-source peer — it sits in the menubar, is keyboard-first, and is also free — but uses a dropdown list rather than the full-screen bezel, which some users prefer and others find harder to scan quickly. Alfred and Raycast both include clipboard history as part of their broader launcher packages; if you already live in one of those ecosystems, their built-in history may make a standalone tool redundant. For pure clipboard management with zero cost and minimal footprint, Flycut and Maccy are the two names worth considering first.
How does Flycut compare to Maccy?
Both are free and open-source, both are keyboard-driven, and both do the core job reliably. The meaningful difference is the UI metaphor: Flycut's bezel overlay centres your attention on the history and feels more deliberate, while Maccy's dropdown stays pinned to the menubar icon and is marginally faster to dismiss. Flycut also supports iCloud sync for multi-Mac workflows, which Maccy does not offer out of the box. Maccy handles images in clipboard history; Flycut is text-focused. For a solo developer on one machine who copies primarily code and text, I find Flycut's full-screen bezel easier to scan under pressure.
