Maccy is a fantastic macOS copy-paste manager that supercharges your clipboard history. It allows you to copy … and copy … and copy again, and still paste the first thing you copied. Of course, it works with cut-and-paste too. It’s super well-designed and very easy to use. With a simple keyboard shortcut, you can bring up a small menu to instantly paste something you cut or copied hours ago.
It’s a fantastic utility that will quickly become a must-have on every Mac you use. You can buy Maccy for just $9.99 on the Mac App Store, or build it from its open-source code yourself.
See your macOS clipboard history with the Maccy clipboard manager
Maccy is a clipboard manager that gets out of your way. It’s primarily worked on by developer Alex Rodionov, but anyone can contribute to the source code. (And dozens of people have!)
Usually, when you copy and paste on Mac, the system erases whatever you copied previously. Only the last thing copied — or cut — is available to paste.
But with Maccy, every time you hit ⌘C to copy, Maccy will remember it. So the second and third and fourth and fifth time you hit ⌘C, you can still go back and paste the first thing. If you copy something important to your clipboard history, like a URL that’s hard to copy, it’s not gone if you copy something else.
Instead of copying and pasting back and forth and back and forth between two windows, you can copy everything in a row from one place and paste all the items in the other. It’s a HUGE timesaver.
Plus, it has the option to paste without formatting, system-wide. This handy option prevents freaky-looking documents with crazy formatting copied over from other apps.
How to get better copy and paste on macOS
Image: Alex Rodionov
To use Maccy, you copy as normal using ⌘C (Command-C) and then hit ⇧⌘C (Shift-Command-C) to pop up the Maccy menu with all the paste options from your clipboard history.
You can easily hit ⌘1 through ⌘9 to re-paste the most recent items in your clipboard history. By default, selecting an item from the menu just puts it on your clipboard, so you have to hit ⌘V (Command-V) to paste it. I recommend turning on Paste automatically in the app’s Preferences. By turning on that setting, hitting an item from the menu auto-pastes it too.
To find something quickly in your clipboard history, just type a few characters to instantly filter items.
If this sounds complicated, it isn’t. The only shortcut you really have to learn is ⇧⌘C (Shift-Command-C), which is easy to remember. With a little practice, it quickly becomes muscle memory.
That’s about as complex as it gets. Maccy is incredibly minimal and stays out of your way; it’s easy to forget Maccy isn’t a built-in feature of macOS. And that’s one of the highest compliments, in my opinion, that you can give any app.
Screenshot: D. Griffin Jones/Cult of Mac
As well as accessing your clipboard history, another nice thing about Maccy is its configurability. Hit the Preferences item at the bottom of the menu to configure the keyboard shortcuts or the interface. The default keyboard shortcut to bring up Maccy, ⇧⌘C, might overlap with one of your favorite apps. You can configure it to something less common in Preferences.
I strongly recommend you do not enable Maccy notifications; all it does is play an annoying alert sound every time you copy something. I also hid the search field and the footer for visual simplicity; I know I can hit ⌘, to bring up the same panel of options at any time.
A life-changing app for a one-time low price
Maccy is the best macOS clipboard manager for just $9.99, which is table stakes for a utility that will so radically change the way you use your Mac.
It’s also open-source, so if you’re comfortable with downloading and building the Xcode project, you can compile it yourself for free.
Price: $9.99
Download from: Mac App Store
Source code: GitHub
Click here to read about four more indispensable utilities I have on my Mac.
