A clipboard manager for macOS. Everything you copy stays on your Mac.
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Get it on the Mac App Store · Download the DMG
Clipbara keeps a history of what you copy. Press ⌘ ⇧ V and a panel slides up at the bottom of the screen without pulling focus from the app you are in. Click a clip once and it is back on your clipboard.
It runs on macOS 14 Sonoma or later and is free on both the Mac App Store and GitHub.
Download Clipbara on the Mac App Store
brew install --cask mobrava/tap/clipbaraDownload the latest .dmg from Releases, open it, and drag the app into Applications. The DMG is signed with an Apple Developer ID and notarized by Apple as of v1.1.11, so it opens without a security warning.
App Store build or DMG build?
Both are free and built from this repository. The App Store build is sandboxed and updates through the App Store. The DMG build updates itself through Sparkle and gets new features first, because App Store releases wait for review.
The two use different bundle identifiers, so they keep separate histories. To carry your clips across, open Settings > General > Backup > Export in one build and Import in the other. Existing clips are kept and duplicates are skipped.
Run only one of them. Two copies register ⌘ ⇧ V twice and open two panels.
- Copy anything with ⌘ C as usual.
- Press ⌘ ⇧ V to open the history panel.
- Type to search, or move between clips with ← and →.
- Click a clip once, or press Return. The clip goes to your clipboard and the panel closes.
- Press ⌘ V in the app you were using.
Inside the panel:
- Space opens and closes Quick Look for the selected clip
- Esc clears the search, steps back, or closes the panel
- ⌘ ⇧ ⌫ clears unpinned history
- Holding ⇧ while pasting flips plain-text pasting for that one paste
- Right-clicking a clip lets you rename it, add it to a Pinboard, or delete it
Both global shortcuts and the Quick Look key can be changed in Settings > Shortcuts.
- Text, rich text, HTML, images, links, files, and colors
- Search by content, title, or source app, with filters for type and date
- Pinboards for the clips you keep reusing
- Quick Look preview without leaving the panel
- Paste as plain text, always or per paste
- Excluded apps, so a password manager never reaches the history
- History limit, appearance, and launch at login
- JSON export and import for moving between machines or builds
History is stored on your Mac with SwiftData and stays there. No account, no server, no analytics.
Capture, search, preview, and paste all work offline. The DMG build reaches the network for one thing, Sparkle update checks, and the App Store build ships without an updater.
Add a password manager, or any other app, under Settings > Exclusions and nothing copied from it is recorded.
Picking a clip puts it on the clipboard and closes the panel, then you press ⌘ V yourself. Pasting on your behalf means synthesizing keystrokes into whatever app is in front, which needs an extra system permission to control other applications. Clipbara neither asks for it nor links against those APIs.
Another app may already hold ⌘ ⇧ V. Record a different combination in Settings > Shortcuts.
Selecting an image clip puts the image back on the macOS clipboard, but a shell prompt cannot accept image data. The program running inside the terminal has to support it, and the shortcut is often not ⌘ V. Codex CLI, for example, attaches the clipboard image with Control V: press ⌘ ⇧ V, pick the image, go back to Codex without copying anything else, then press Control V.
The DMG build stores it in ~/Library/Application Support/com.minsang.PasteClip. The App Store build is sandboxed, so it stores it in ~/Library/Containers/com.minsang.Clipbara. Deleting that folder deletes the history.
To uninstall, drag the app to the Trash, or run brew uninstall --cask mobrava/tap/clipbara if you installed it with Homebrew.
It was, until August 2026. An unrelated app on the Mac App Store already used that name. Releases up to v1.1.11 still ship as PasteClip, and old links redirect on their own.
Requires macOS 14 or later, Xcode 16 or later, and XcodeGen.
git clone https://github.com/mobrava/Clipbara.git
cd Clipbara
brew install xcodegen
xcodegen generate
open Clipbara.xcodeprojBuild and run the Clipbara scheme with ⌘ R. The app is Swift 6 with strict concurrency on, SwiftUI hosted inside an AppKit NSPanel, and SwiftData for storage. Global shortcuts come from KeyboardShortcuts, and DMG updates from Sparkle.
I wanted the card-style clipboard history that Paste has, without the subscription. Once I had built it for myself, charging for the same thing felt off, so Clipbara is free on the App Store and here.
A clipboard manager sees everything you copy, including the things you would rather it did not. That is reason enough to be able to read the code that touches it.
Issues and pull requests are welcome. CONTRIBUTING.md covers the CLA that the dual licensing requires, and CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md applies.
Clipbara is available under the GNU General Public License v3.0.
The Mac App Store edition is distributed by the copyright holder under a separate proprietary license (dual licensing). The source code for both editions lives in this repository.