Maccy is an open source lightweight and searchable clipboard manager for macOS | Hacker News Reader

Maccy is an open source lightweight and searchable clipboard manager for macOS

github.com

134 pointsnickjj64 comments

For a good paid option, Alfred[0] includes a pretty robust clipboard history manager along with a ton of other features, all in an extremely lightweight (15.6MB disk size/~40MB memory) package. You need the paid Power Pack for to use that feature, but both single version and lifetime upgrade licenses are cheap. I went for the lifetime upgrade option which so far has worked out to $12/year and improves in value each year.

[0]: https://www.alfredapp.com

this is a great solution and gives you a lot of options for scripting your Mac.

I use Alfred, but having tried at least a dozen clipboard managers, Paste[1] is still my favorite (mainly for the way it handles presentation and searching of saved clips).

[1] https://pasteapp.io

Will definitely give it a shot, very polished looking. Always a treat to see Mac apps like that.

I tried paste, but it is too much in your face for my taste.

Would love something like the clipboard manager from the JetBrain suite as a global clipboard manager.

Will give Alfred a try, thanks!

I swear by Paste as well, since coming from Windows, it mimics the Windows clipboard ui and hence was easy to get used to. I do wish that macOS at some point makes a native clipboard manager.

I use it a lot, but it sometimes is too slow to catch my copy action. Maybe the newer version is better? But I was very disappointed they switched to a subscription model (1-2 years ago?). Looking on their website now, maybe I should reconsider, but its not even clear how much. And too many features for me anyway.

From their website:

"Everything secure: All Paste data is stored in your own iCloud Drive using industry-standard security technologies and encryption."

Maybe it's me, but reading "everything secure" I was expecting the next paragraph to be something along the lines of "nothing leaves your computer" rather than "we store your sh*t on the cloud"...

Yeah, that's a great way to get your passwords and keys in the open.

You can disable iCloud sync.

Not the point, though. I don't trust a "secure" product that defaults to an unsafe behavior. If they put functionality above security in this aspect, then where else did they, too?

I think I've spent £30.80 on Alfred during the last 11 years, so I'm doing less than three quid a year. It's basically one of the first things I always install on a new Mac. Never needed a separate clipboard manager because of it either.

LaunchBar[0], which predates Alfred but is similar in function, also has a fantastic searchable clipboard manager which includes a feature that I've not been able to find in any other clipboard manager: a push/pop stack.

With this feature you can, for example, copy a bunch of different items from a web page on to the stack, then paste them sequentially in a web form and pop them from the stack so that they're no longer in the clipboard history. With this workflow there's no hopping back and forth between pages, you do all of the copying at once in one place and all of the pasting at once in the other. It all happens via keyboard shortcuts, no interaction with the LaunchBar UI at all.

This feature is what's been keeping me on LaunchBar for almost 15 years now. Alfred looks great, but without this push/pop feature in the clipboard manager I'd have a hard time switching.

[0]: https://obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html

Pastebot [0] is another very nice clipboard manager that has this stack feature as well.

[0]: https://tapbots.com/pastebot/

Paste (https://pasteapp.io/) has this feature too.

I use TextClipboardHistory because it has Maccy’s current feature set, but is hackable via Lua and is a Hammerspoon Spoon. being a spoon will automatically install it, not clutter my /Applications dir, and easily use VCS to maintain my configuration for it.

https://www.hammerspoon.org/Spoons/TextClipboardHistory.html

example of configuration (also installs it)

https://github.com/vladdoster/hammerspoon-configuration/blob...

The domain hammer.org seems to have been taken over by some other organization...

Or maybe it was just a typo, the real page appears to be https://www.hammerspoon.org/Spoons/TextClipboardHistory.html

A typo -- corrected. Thanks.

I'm using it too. Personally, I like it. But sometimes it lags so much if you copies a huge amount of text into the clipboard.

Try this version which is lag free.

https://github.com/vladdoster/hammerspoon-configuration/comm...

I've been using CopyQ for years on Linux, macOS, and Windows, highly recommend it - https://hluk.github.io/CopyQ/

Thanks, I've tried a few of these and this is my favorite so far

I've been using CopyQ for years as well. It took a while to setup and the preferences UX is messy, but it has lots of customization options, and results in the best UX imo.

Maccy has pretty poor visuals when copy pasting images, rich text, etc. I find it important to visualize the actual look of some media when looking for it in the history. CopyQ is amazing at that.

I used to use Maccy with Alfred a while back and it was great. love how it doesn't get in the way and just works

however if you want both in one without paying for the Alfred powerpack, I highly recommend Raycast. Alfred powerpack could of course be worth the price, but I find Raycast nicer with its extensions more suited to me.

> however if you want both in one without paying for the Alfred powerpack, I highly recommend Raycast.

Came here to post this. I'm a convert to Raycast (free, proprietary) from Alfred with Power Pack, but Raycast is stellar. It's got a searchable Clipboard History, and additionally you can filter by type (text, images, files, links, colors).

What data Raycast sends home? The kind of tool it is I think it’ll have access to a lot - maybe everything, or almost.

I'm not sure about what data it sends home, a lot of stuff I use with Raycast tend to be done locally.

also all extensions on the store are open sourced (https://github.com/raycast/extensions) so you could audit it yourself as well.

People always say "just use alfred" but I mostly use Mac as an excuse to get a Unix terminal at work and don't really use or need a large addon like Alfred even though I can see how one might.

For me all I need is the clipboard functionality and as a clipboard manager maccy is the best. Highly advise people to install it and if they like it buy the app store version to help it's development.

I have been using Flycut for many years, seems very similar. https://github.com/TermiT/Flycut/

I was a flycut fan. If you like flycut, you'll love maccy.

My only reservations with clipboard managers are that I still do a lot of password transfer using the clipboard. If only my last copy is resident in memory then the risk seems low, but if it retains all of my history then it seems quite risky.

How do people using these apps manage this problem? Is everyone completely using password manager auto-fill instead?

Maccy has sensible default options that ignore content marked as confidential or coming from specific apps: https://github.com/p0deje/Maccy#ignore-custom-copy-types.

Ok, that's cool!

I've been using Jumpcut since 2008 when I switched to macos, and I'm pretty prone to app inertia, but that might actually make me switch. thanks.

thanks

just tried it out with unix pass which is what I use mostly and somewhat understandably it didn't manage to stop it recording it in the clipboard history. Not sure how well it can work with pure terminal apps like that.

ok - replying to myself - defining a function to overlay the normal pass command can work around it like this:

    function pass() {                                           
        defaults write org.p0deje.Maccy ignoreEvents true ;
        sleep 1;
        /opt/local/bin/pass -c "$@" ;
        echo "Copied password to clipboard for $*";
        sleep 1;
        defaults write org.p0deje.Maccy ignoreEvents false;
    }

I think this might work ok!

I don't know how it works, but with my passwords from keepass get wiped from my clipboard manager automagically on timeout.

I like iClip [1] for this purpose, for one substantial reason: You can use the "left-arrow" icon on each history box to past the unstyled (that is, plain text with no fonts, colors, sizes, etc.) version of whatever text is in that box.

1: http://iclipapp.com

https://github.com/TermiT/Flycut mentions needing System Preferences -> Security & Privacy -> Privacy -> Accessibility access; how is Maccy able to function without it?

it doesn't function without it. In order to paste something through Maccy, you need to give it this access.

Aside: even after getting this prompt, I don't see an option to choose Maccy in the System Preferences -> Accessibility menu, hmm...

PS: I'm a huge Flycut fan – clipboard management massively improves my life, and it's the best clipboard manager that I've found.

Then there’s https://clipy-app.com as well (FOSS). But I prefer Maccy.

Unlike many other top comments here I prefer dedicated smaller tools for individual tasks.

I'm always trying to avoid additional tools, menubar apps, running at all times whenever possible. Alfred served many other purposes and with the PowerPack, the clipboard manager can be unlocked. This is one good option to try it out. I wrote about it some time back https://brajeshwar.com/2014/access-clipboard-history-alfred-...

I've occasionally been interested in playing with clipboard managers, but I've always been stopped by the fact that at least a few times a day, I copy something I don't want a persistent record of (e.g. a password). How do other people deal with this? Do you just accept that your clipboard manager will save copies of all your passwords? Do you exclusively use an auto-type solution that doesn't use copy/paste? Something else?

Alfred let’s me delete entries from its clipboard history feature.

Alfred’s clipboard manager lets you block remembering copies from certain apps - for me that’s just 1Password.

You can also set up a short lifetime for the history, eg 24hrs.

Otherwise? SOL unless you manually prune sensitive entries.

When in doubt, DOD wipe.

I'm kind of the opposite, being able to pin my Github PAT so that I can do commits from remote servers I'm working on, has been awesome.

If you’re on Windows, can wholeheartedly recommend https://ditto-cp.sourceforge.io

Ditto is good but I am partial to the user interface of an AutoHotkey program called ClipJump[1]. The main functions are all accessible with the regular Ctrl and ZXC keys, in the normal flow. Pressing Ctrl+V while holding Ctrl down brings up a tooltip with the current item on the clipboard, and you can move backwards and forwards through the stack by tapping C and V (while still holding Ctrl). Tapping X switches actions (Paste, Cancel, Delete, Delete All), and releasing Ctrl commits the action. It's so intuitive that it makes other clipboard managers feel clunky. And tapping Z strips the text formatting.

While it is written in AutoHotkey and hasn't seen any updates in 8 years, it still works perfectly under Windows 11. The code is pure spaghetti and filled with goto statements and global variables and trying to understand it is a lost cause, but despite that it's almost bug-free and covers all of the corner cases, including copying from zip files, Microsoft Office documents, images, files, etc. Way back when it was just someone's project on the AHK forums I contributed a couple of fixes to it, before it was so complex.

[1] http://clipjump.sourceforge.net/

If you're on Windows, Win+V opens a basic clipboard manager

Raycast has a decent clipboard history and snippets manager.

I've been using Raycast as a drop-in upgrade for Spotlight. I'm tempted to try Alfred but this has been great.

> I'm tempted to try Alfred but this has been great.

I'm a convert from Alfred. At least for how I used Alfred (including its Power Pack), I haven't seen a reason to go back.

IIRC last time I tried it a couple of years ago it had memory issues and wasn't very scalable so I switched to clippy. Will give it another try

How would this kind of software interact with a password manager? If I ever copy my password, will it be stored in an insecure way somewhere?

as a user of Maccy, yes anything you put on the clipboard will be an entry in plain text. Maybe there is a way to do a 'secure' copy with Maccy but I'm not using it so I can view my passwords via the buffer.

edits: I guess this is only the case when you copy the plain-text. Seems there are event types associated with the copied target that Maccy will ignore if it believes it is a 'confidential type' Check the GitHub README

I've been using Maccy for about a year now, after Quicksilver inexplicably decided to stop working on one of my comps. Even though subsequent updates have fixed Qucksilver, I still keep Maccy around for the clipboard features. So much more user-friendly than Quicksilver's were.

So thanks for creating Maccy and double thanks for making it free!

Not sure about Maccy, but I’ve been using „Copy’em” (https://apprywhere.com/ce-mac.html) for last few years and been really happy with it. I highly recommend it if someone is looking for something like this.

I've used Ditto on Windows which was really good.

But I had to move to using a Mac and Linux ecosystem. I found and adopted CopyQ, which then became my main clipboard manager, and which then supplanted Ditto as my clipboard of choice. I highly recommend CopyQ. It's great.

I've been using Ditto for a really long time on Windows too.

I recently had to use macOS for work (company issued MBP) and Maccy was the only clipboard manager I could find that was similar to Ditto.

It opens a tiny fuzzy searchable menu next to your cursor where you can quickly find a previously copied item to paste. That's all I really wanted from a clipboard manager.

None of CopyQ's screenshots show that behavior. Its list of features also doesn't mention searching. Does it do all of the above except the marketing page and docs are bad at showing those things off? Also does is support's Ditto's ability to let you have a hotkey for pasting and a separate hotkey for pasting without formatting?

Have I been waiting in vain for Apple to steal all the best clipboard ideas and roll them into Finder? For whatever their reasons for annual upgrades, isn't it inevitable that Apple will at some point give us a modern clipboard?

I thought they've been the endeavor to new useful day to day features but somehow they're not putting a clipboard manager yet even when Windows now has a native one.

Emacs, for instance, has this amazing kill-ring feature for decades - around 40 years. It is not a modern concept. I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple had this too someday, but removed for better ux.

Klippy is an open source, lightweight and searchable clipboard manager built-in to KDE!

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