ClipdFree, with no catch
No subscription, no trial, no account, no telemetry, no analytics. There is no company behind Clipd and no server anyone is paying to keep running.
Clipboard history for macOS
Everything you copy,
one keystroke away.
Clipd keeps what you copy, searches all of it, and pastes what you pick back into the app you were using. Free, open source, and it syncs through a bucket that belongs to you.
SyncMerge.swift
func planSync(mine: Record, theirs: Record) -> SyncAction {
if mine.updatedAt > theirs.updatedAt { return .upload(mine.id) }
// Equal timestamps, and one side is a tombstone. Delete wins.
return .nothing(mine.id)
}Pick a card, or press 1 to 6. On your Mac it is ⌘ ⇧ V, from anywhere.
Why this one
A clipboard manager sees your passwords.
A clipboard manager sees your passwords.
So it should not ask for your trust.
Clipd reads everything you copy, which on a normal working day includes API tokens, private keys and passwords. That is a lot to hand to a closed program run by a company you have never met. So it is built the other way round: nothing to trust, because nothing is hidden and there is nowhere for your data to go that you do not already own.
Open source and auditable
MIT licensed and public. The repository records not only what was chosen but what was rejected and why, including the platform assumptions that turned out to be false when they were tested.
Your bucket, your data
Sync goes through a Cloudflare R2 bucket in your own account. There is no Clipd server in the middle. Stop using the app tomorrow and your data has not moved anywhere.
Encrypted before it leaves
Items are sealed with AES-GCM using a key derived from a passphrase you type on both Macs. Cloudflare stores ciphertext it cannot read. The local database is SQLCipher, keyed from the macOS Keychain.
What it does
Built for people who copy code all day.
Copied code keeps its colours
Copy a function, a manifest or a query and the card shows it the way your editor would, with its indentation and its syntax colours intact.
The language is worked out from the text itself, so nothing has to be tagged by hand: Swift, TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, Go, Rust, Ruby, Bash, SQL, JSON, YAML and Markdown. Prose stays plain, because colouring an ordinary email is worse than missing a snippet.
Name things, and find them by the name
Give any item a name, and search matches the name as well as the content. You can find something by a word that is not in it at all: call a block of YAML “staging deploy” and that is what you type three weeks later.
Pinboards group the things you keep coming back to. Retention decides what happens to everything else: a day, a week, a month, a year, or keep it forever.
Keyboard
The whole app is nine keys.
The panel opens over whatever you were doing, including fullscreen apps. Type to filter, press Enter, and the item lands in the app you came from. No Dock icon, no window in your way.
- ⌘ ⇧ V Open the panel
- ⌘ 1 to 9 Paste the card wearing that number
- ⌃ 1 to 9 Switch pinboard
- ⌫ Delete the selected item
- esc Close and give focus back
Privacy
Four layers, because one is not enough.
They are numbered because they run in that order, and each catches something the one before it misses.
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Layer 0
The confidential marker
Clipd honours the
ConcealedTypeflag that password managers set on a copy they would rather nobody kept. -
Layer 1
Deny-list by app
Copies from named apps are never recorded. It ships pre-filled with Passwords.app, Keychain Access, Bitwarden and 1Password, and any item offers “never save from this app”.
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Layer 2
The auto-clear rule
If the clipboard is wiped shortly after something was copied, that item is deleted retroactively, payload and all. Wiping the clipboard a minute later is what password managers do.
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Layer 3
Encrypted at rest
The database is SQLCipher and the key lives in the macOS Keychain. Image payloads are encrypted on disk too, rather than sitting in the clear beside an encrypted database.
The reason there are four
Apple's own Passwords.app sets no confidentiality marker at all. This was measured, not assumed: a real password copy arrives as a 20 byte plain text item, with nothing to tell it apart from any other short copy. Bitwarden does set the marker. Apple does not.
A clipboard manager relying on that marker alone, as the feature name “ignore confidential content” suggests, would write your Apple passwords straight into its database. That one measurement is why layer 1 ships pre-filled and why layer 2 exists at all.
You can check this yourself. It is in the repository, along with the raw pasteboard dump it came from.
Sync
Two Macs, one bucket, no middleman.
Optional. Clipd works fully offline and sends nothing anywhere until you enter R2 credentials yourself. When you do, this is the whole of it.
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On your Mac
Sealed before it moves
Each item is encrypted with AES-GCM. The key comes from your passphrase through PBKDF2-SHA256 at 210,000 iterations, and never leaves the Mac.
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In your account
Stored where you keep it
The ciphertext lands in a Cloudflare R2 bucket in your own account. Cloudflare cannot read it, and neither can anyone without your passphrase.
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On your other Mac
Decrypted and merged
The newest edit wins, and a deletion is recorded as a deletion rather than an absence, so removing something on one Mac does not bring it back from the other.
Install
Four steps, then it is out of your way.
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Download and drag it in
Open the DMG and drag Clipd into your Applications folder.
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Clear the quarantine flag, once
Clipd is signed with an Apple Development certificate, which a free Apple account cannot have notarised. Gatekeeper needs one command before it will open the app.
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Clipd.app -
Grant Accessibility
Pasting works by sending ⌘ V to the app you were using, and macOS only allows that with permission. Clipd asks at first launch, opens the right pane of System Settings, and notices the moment you turn the switch on. There is nothing to quit and reopen.
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Press the shortcut
⌘ ⇧ V from anywhere. To share a history with a second Mac, create an R2 bucket, make an API token scoped to that one bucket with object read and write, paste the four values into Settings, and set the same passphrase on both machines.
Before you install
What you should know.
All of this is in the repository anyway. It is here because you should not have to go looking for it.
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!
It is not notarised
A free Apple Developer account cannot notarise anything. That is why step two of the install exists. If you would rather not trust a downloaded binary at all, build it from source, which is four commands.
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!
It is pre-1.0
Clipd is used every day by the person who wrote it, and it has 314 tests, but it has not been through many hands yet. Expect rough edges, and please report them.
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!
Browser password managers are a known gap
A password copied out of Chrome's or Safari's built-in manager sets no marker, and the source app is the browser, which cannot be deny-listed without losing everything else you copy from it. Only the encrypted database and deleting the item cover that case.
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!
macOS 15 or later
Clipd uses Swift 6 with strict concurrency and several newer AppKit and CryptoKit APIs. Supporting older systems would mean carrying compatibility paths nobody is currently running.
For the sceptical
Build it yourself and skip the binary.
The most honest thing an app like this can offer. You need Xcode 26 and a free Apple account.
git clone https://github.com/hengkysandy/clipd.git
cd clipd
brew install xcodegen
./app up
./app up builds it, installs it to Applications and launches
it. ./app test runs both test suites. Contributions are
welcome, and the
contributing guide
explains where code goes and why.