How-to guides
Learn ClipBuddy
Short, practical guides to every ClipBuddy feature: what it does, the exact steps to use it, and what it needs. 24 guides, all written against the version on the App Store.
Getting started
The four things that make ClipBuddy useful on day one.
Start here
Clipboard history
Press ⌘⇧V to open ClipBuddy, use the arrow keys or type to find the clip you want, then press Enter to put it back on your clipboard and ⌘V to paste it.
- Search Pro Open the picker with ⌘⇧V and start typing. ClipBuddy matches words, tolerates typos, and can also find clips by meaning, by the app they came from, or by date using filter chips.
- Collections and labels Pro Group clips into named collections, pin the ones you reuse so they stay at the top, and give a label its own hotkey to filter the picker in one keystroke.
- Copy sessions ClipBuddy groups your history into sessions, split whenever you step away for more than half an hour and labelled by the app you used most, so you can reopen an entire sitting and copy anything back.
Make it yours
Where the picker opens, how it is laid out, and how it looks.
- Picker layout In Settings, choose where the picker opens (bottom, top, left, right or at the mouse pointer), pick a horizontal ribbon or a grid of 1 to 6 columns, and drag the corner handle on any card to resize it live. ⌘⇧V
- Themes and appearance Open Settings and pick one of 27 accent and card-tint combos, or set your own hex colors. Frosted glass lets the desktop show through, Super Black is true #000000 for OLED, and the picker's font and text size are yours to set.
- Keyboard shortcuts ⌘⇧V opens the picker, ⌘⌥E opens emoji, ⌘⌥Z is clipboard undo, ⌘⌥S is the paste stack and ⌘⌥1 to 9 are the slots. Every one of them can be rebound in Settings, with conflict detection so two actions never fight over one combination. ⌘⇧V
Paste faster
Stacks, slots, undo, snippets, and the keys that drive them.
- Paste stack Press ⌘⌥S to open the Paste Stack, copy several things in a row, then paste them back one at a time in the order you copied them. ⌘⌥S
- Clipboard slots Save text into a slot with ⌘⌥⇧1 to ⌘⌥⇧9 and paste it back any time with ⌘⌥1 to ⌘⌥9. Nine registers, no window, no search. ⌘⌥1 to 9
- Clipboard undo Press ⌘⌥Z to walk your clipboard back through recent history, so a copy that overwrote something you still needed is not lost. ⌘⌥Z
- Paste modes Enter always copies the selected clip. In the default Clipboard mode that is all it does, and you press ⌘V. Turn on Settings, General, Paste Items, Paste to the app in front and Enter also pastes it into the app you were using.
- Snippets Pro Save reusable text as a snippet with a keyword, then press ⌘⇧V, type the keyword and press Enter. ClipBuddy fills the placeholders and puts the finished text on your clipboard, ready to paste with ⌘V. ⌘⇧V then keyword
- Emoji picker Press ⌘⌥E to open a searchable picker of more than 2,300 emoji, including flags and skin tones. It is free for everyone and the catalog is generated on your Mac. ⌘⌥E
Images and text
Read text out of screenshots, cover secrets, reshape any clip.
- Text in screenshots ClipBuddy reads the words inside your screenshots on device with Apple Vision, so searching for a word finds the image that contains it, and you can select and copy that text straight out of the picture.
- Automatic screenshot capture Point ClipBuddy at the folders your screenshots are saved to and every ⌘⇧3, ⌘⇧4 or ⌘⇧5 capture joins your history automatically, with its text recognized at capture. ⌘⇧3 / ⌘⇧4 / ⌘⇧5
- Redact an image Pro Open an image clip, let ClipBuddy find the secrets and faces in it, cover them with opaque boxes and copy the redacted version. It runs on your Mac with Vision, and boxes are used rather than blur because blur can be reversed.
- Markdown preview Copy Markdown and open its preview in ClipBuddy to read it rendered, with headings, lists, links and code, then copy back either the original source or the plain text.
- Developer tools ClipBuddy can diff two clips side by side, show a copied CSV as a real table, syntax highlight code with the language detected for you, and generate UUIDs, Unix time conversions and parsed URLs, all on device.
- Transforms Pick a clip and run a transform on it: case changes, camelCase, snake_case, trim, base64, URL encode, JSON pretty print or minify, hashes, sort and dedupe. You can also edit a clip before pasting it.
Automation and AI
Let rules act the moment you copy, and run Apple's on-device model over a clip.
- Rules A rule matches a copy on its app, type, length or text, then acts on it immediately: clean a tracking link, run a transform, extract the email or number, compress an image, pin it, burn it after one paste, or file it under a label. Nothing is active until you add one.
- On-device AI Pro Turn on the actions you want in Settings, then run them on a text clip: summarize it, rewrite or reformat it, extract action items, or explain code, a regex, a shell command or an error. It runs on Apple's on-device model, so nothing leaves your Mac.
Privacy and control
What ClipBuddy captures, what it hides, and what it never stores in plain text.
- Touch ID vault Pro Turn on Detect and vault secrets and a recognized credential goes into the Vault instead of plain history. Revealing or pasting one needs Touch ID or your device password, and the value clears itself from the clipboard after 60 seconds.
- Privacy controls Add apps to the capture blocklist so they are never recorded, pause capture for a set time from the menu bar, clear history whenever your Mac locks, strip tracking parameters from copied URLs, and hide every ClipBuddy window from screen shares and recordings.
- Encrypted backups Export your history to a single passphrase-encrypted file using AES-256-GCM, with the key stretched by PBKDF2-SHA256 over 210,000 iterations. The passphrase never leaves your Mac and nobody can reset it.