ClipBuddy for Mac — full feature list

ClipBuddy for Mac is a native macOS clipboard manager (a Mac app, not a browser extension). It remembers everything you copy, makes it searchable and one keystroke away, keeps your reusable snippets ready to paste, and keeps everything on your Mac. Here is everything it does.

Clipboard history

• Automatically saves everything you copy: text, images, links, files, code and JSON.
• Searchable across your whole history — type to filter instantly.
• Open from anywhere with ⌘⇧V; press Enter to copy it back — then ⌘V pastes it right where you were.
• Smart filters by type: links, JSON, files, images, code.
• Resizable picker — drag the width and height, or cycle a size preset from the header.

Search — meaning, filters and smart folders

• Universal Search (new in 2.5): one query in the picker surfaces matching clips, emoji and Labels together, so you find anything in one place instead of switching tabs.
• Search by meaning: find “that wifi password” or “the address” even when those exact words aren’t in the clip. Runs on Apple’s on-device language model — nothing leaves your Mac.
• Filter chips: pick a filter and it drops a removable pill into the search bar — app:, type:, date (after:/before:, today, 7d), has:link/email/phone/number/code. Combine freely; same-category filters OR, different ones AND.
• Exact phrases with "quotes", exclude with -word, OR with a|b, plus a sort menu (newest, oldest, most-copied, recently-used).
• Typo-tolerant: a misspelled query still finds the clip — search “recieve” and the clip that says “receive” still comes back.
• Ask in plain language (new in 2.8): type “screenshots from Chrome last week” and ClipBuddy turns it into ordinary filter chips you can see and edit. It never guesses silently — every part of the query becomes a chip, so you always know what it searched for. Runs on Apple’s on-device model; needs macOS 26.
• Voice search: tap the mic in the search bar and say what you are looking for. Transcribed entirely on your Mac with Apple’s on-device speech, and the microphone is used only while you are actively dictating. Hidden on Macs without on-device speech.
• Saved searches become smart folders — pin a query as a live chip in the picker and reopen it anytime.
• Show in timeline — from any result, jump to the moment you copied it and see what you were working on either side of it.
• Matched terms are highlighted in every result so you see why it matched.

Screenshot & image text search (on-device)

• Reads the words inside images and screenshots using macOS Vision, on your Mac.
• Find a screenshot by typing the text it contains — e.g. search “invoice”.
• Copy the text back out: open an image clip and pick the exact word, line or block — no retyping.
• Screenshot smart actions: ClipBuddy spots a phone number, email, link, date or address in a screenshot and offers one tap — Call, Email, Open or Map.
• No upload, no server — recognition happens locally.

Redact a screenshot before you share it (new in 2.8, Pro)

• Spot a password, API key, card number, email, phone number or a face in an image clip and cover it with an opaque box — then copy the safe version.
• Boxes, not blur. Blurred or pixelated text can often be reversed well enough to read short, high-entropy strings back out — exactly the kind of thing worth hiding. A filled box destroys the pixels.
• Runs on your Mac using Vision and the same local detector the Vault uses. Nothing is uploaded.
• It covers the text it can read, and it tells you to check the image before sharing — an automatic scan can’t promise it caught faint or stylised text.

Encrypted backups (new in 2.8)

• Export your whole history to a single passphrase-encrypted file — AES-256-GCM, with the key stretched by PBKDF2-SHA256 over 210,000 iterations.
• No escrow and no recovery. The passphrase never leaves your Mac and nobody can reset it, which is the point — and means a lost passphrase is a lost backup.

Markdown preview (new in 2.8)

• Copy Markdown and read it rendered in a popover — headings, lists, links, code — then copy back either the source or the plain text.
• Rendered by Foundation’s own Markdown support. No web view, no network.

On-device AI — Summarize, Rewrite, Extract & Explain

• Summarize any text clip to 1–3 sentences, or Rewrite / format it (fix grammar, punctuation and structure), as a quick action.
• Extract action items pulls the tasks out of a clip as a bullet list; Explain this puts code, a regex, a shell command or an error into plain language.
• Powered by Apple Foundation Models — the on-device LLM, with Apple Intelligence turned on in System Settings. Nothing leaves your Mac.
• Each action is a separate switch, off by default; Pro, and available on macOS 26+ (the rest of ClipBuddy runs on macOS 13+). The model is only loaded when you use one.

Hide while screen sharing (new in 2.9.1)

• One switch keeps every ClipBuddy window out of screen shares, recordings and screenshots — Zoom, Meet, Teams, QuickTime, OBS and ⌘⇧4 alike — while it stays fully visible on your own screen.
• The same window-server flag password managers use. No permission prompt, no extra entitlement.
• Off by default, free for everyone, and honest about its edge: a camera pointed at your screen still sees what your screen shows.

Copy Sessions

• Your history groups itself into work sessions — a coding sprint, a research dig — split whenever you step away for more than half an hour, and labelled by the app you used most.
• Open a session to see everything you copied in one sitting and copy any of it back. Save the sessions worth keeping; your history is never touched.
• Pure grouping of clips you already have. Nothing to set up, nothing captured that wasn’t already.

Paste power — undo, slots and a stack

• Clipboard undo (⌘⌥Z): overwrote something? Walk the clipboard back through recent history.
• Clipboard slots (⌘⌥1–9): nine reusable registers for the text you retype all day — save with ⌘⌥⇧1–9, paste with ⌘⌥1–9.
• Paste Stack (⌘⌥S): collect several copies, then paste them back one at a time — perfect for filling forms.

Paste, your way (new in 2.4)

• By default, picking a clip copies it — you paste with ⌘V, no permissions needed.
• Optional direct paste: turn on “Paste to the app in front” in Settings and a picked clip pastes itself into whatever app you’re using. Off by default; ClipBuddy asks for the Accessibility permission only when you enable it, and copy-and-⌘V keeps working if you don’t.

Pause capture (new in 2.4)

• Stop recording new copies for a while — 15 minutes, 30, an hour, 3 or 8 hours, or until you resume — from the menu bar or the picker. The menu-bar icon shows a pause badge while paused, so nothing you copy in the meantime is saved.

Rules & routine (new in 2.4)

• Rules act the moment you copy: clean tracking links, run a transform, extract just the email, domain or number, compress a copied image, pin, burn-after-paste, or file the clip under a label — matched on the app, the type, length, or the text (with search syntax: a | b, -exclude, "exact phrase").
• Starter Rules (new in 2.5) — a gallery of one-click presets: turn “file every screenshot under a Screenshots collection”, “clean tracking links”, “vault anything that looks like a secret” and more into a working rule in a single tap. Nothing is active until you add one.
• Frequent — a smart filter of the clips you re-copy most, and a floating Quick Palette that keeps your pinned and frequent clips one click away.
• Save-as-snippet nudge — copy the same text a few times and ClipBuddy offers to make it a snippet.

Screenshots & recordings, captured automatically

• Every ⌘⇧3/4/5 screenshot lands in your history the moment you take it — no copying needed. You pick the folders once — watch as many as you like, not just the Desktop; nothing else on your Mac is accessed.
• Text inside screenshots is searchable — on-device recognition runs at capture.
• Screen recordings are captured too, with a real video-frame thumbnail; pasting drops the actual file.

Speaks your language

• The whole app is translated into 16 languages — every menu, setting, button and message, not just the marketing pages: English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese (Brazil), Dutch, Swedish, Japanese, Korean, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Russian, Polish, Turkish and Ukrainian.
• ClipBuddy follows your Mac’s language automatically; you can also pick one in Settings.

Made for code

• Syntax highlighting — code clips are colored (keywords, strings, comments, numbers) right in the card and the ⌘Y preview, with the language auto-detected: Swift, Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Rust, Go, Java, C++, shell, SQL, JSON, YAML, HTML, CSS.

Developer tools (new in 2.5)

• CSV table viewer — a copied CSV opens as a real table instead of a wall of commas.
• Two-clip diff — compare two clips side by side and see exactly what changed.
• Generators — UUID, Unix-time ↔ date, and URL parsing, available both in the picker and as one-tap transforms. Everything runs on-device.

Find any setting (new in 2.5)

• A search box in Settings jumps straight to the row you want, and each row’s explanation now lives behind a tidy ⓘ instead of a wall of text.

Faster & smoother (2.5)

• A big responsiveness pass: no background lag after launch, backup and restore run without freezing the window, and image-heavy scrolling stays smooth.

Picker, your way

• Open at your mouse pointer — a compact floating panel right where you’re working (drag it anywhere), or keep the classic bottom drawer.
• Multi-file copies grouped — one card shows “N files” plus the actual filenames.

Snippets — keyword triggers

• Save reusable text as snippets with keyword triggers, organized into groups.
• Press ⌘⇧V, type the keyword, Enter — ClipBuddy fills the placeholders and puts the snippet on your clipboard, ready to paste with ⌘V.
• Dynamic placeholders: date, time, clipboard, cursor position, fill-in fields, UUID, with modifiers ({clipboard | uppercase | trim}).
• Fill-in fields: a snippet can include fill-in fields ({Your field}) with optional defaults; you complete them before ClipBuddy copies the resolved snippet.

Quick actions & transforms

• One-tap actions on detected colours, sums, phone numbers and emails; make a QR code, scan a QR/barcode out of an image, open a link, reveal in Finder, and Translate on-device on macOS 14.4+ between languages supported by Apple’s Translation framework.
• Fix spelling on any text clip with the on-device system dictionary.
• Remove the background from an image clip (on-device, macOS 14+) and copy the cutout.
• Transform any clip: case, camelCase, snake_case, trim, base64, URL-encode, JSON pretty/minify, hashes, sort & dedupe — or edit before you paste, and paste the result straight in.

Organize, multi-select, backup

• Collections: group clips into named folders and filter by them from the picker.
• Related clips: from any clip, jump to others with similar meaning.
• Burn-after-paste: arm a clip and it deletes itself (and scrubs the pasteboard) the moment it’s pasted once.
• Multi-select: mark several items and copy them back as one, in order, with a separator you choose (newline, comma, space, tab).
• Drag-out: drag any clip to Finder — images and files drop as themselves, text drops as a real .txt.
• Pinned clips and custom labels (with label hotkeys); backup & restore the whole history (encrypted, see above); usage stats; launch at login.

Vault — Touch ID for copied secrets (Pro)

• Turn on Detect & vault secrets and a recognized credential — an API key, a card number, a password-shaped string — goes into the Vault instead of sitting in plain history. Detection is off by default, so ClipBuddy never silently changes how new copies are handled.
• Touch ID (or your device password) every time you reveal or paste it; the value is copied out marked-concealed and clears itself from the clipboard after 60 seconds.
• Choose what gets vaulted (new in 2.9.1): Settings lists every kind of secret ClipBuddy can watch for, each with its own switch — payment cards, bank accounts (IBAN), password-like text, API tokens and private keys. Turn off any you would rather keep in ordinary history, or turn detection off entirely. Rules can opt out per rule too.
• Card wallet: save your cards once; every field is encrypted and revealed per-field, behind Touch ID.
• Encrypted on your Mac with keys that never leave it — vault items in a backup can only be read again on the same Mac. Search never sees them. When detection is enabled on the free tier, recognized secret-looking copies are simply never saved at all.

Privacy controls

• Per-app capture blocklist: tell ClipBuddy to never capture from chosen apps (your password manager, banking apps).
• Clean tracking links: strip utm_*, fbclid, gclid and friends from a copied URL automatically (opt-in).
• Clear on lock: wipe your clipboard history every time your Mac locks (pinned clips are kept). Off by default.

Emoji picker — ⌘⌥E

• Press ⌘⌥E for a searchable picker of 2,300+ emoji — flags and skin tones included, generated on your Mac. Free for everyone.

Shortcuts & control

• Configurable global shortcuts for the picker, emoji, undo, paste-stack and the slot base modifier, with conflict detection so two actions never fight over one combo.
• Per-label hotkeys, and a resizable, size-adjustable picker.

Private & lightweight

• Local-first — your clipboard never leaves your Mac, no cloud, no account, no tracking. Even OCR, Translate, voice search and the AI actions run on your Mac.
• Sensitive copies are handled for you: copies a source app marks concealed (password managers, secure fields) are never saved at all. If you enable optional secret detection, recognized credentials go into the Touch ID Vault on Pro instead of your plain history.
• No network access at all: ClipBuddy ships without the outbound-network entitlement, so it cannot send anything anywhere. See the privacy policy.
• No account, ever. Free for your last 10 clips; Pro unlocks unlimited searchable history. Eligible subscribers may receive a 7-day free trial, confirmed by Apple before purchase.
• Built in Swift/AppKit — a tiny menu-bar app, no Electron.

Get ClipBuddy for Mac →