Clipboard history on Mac.
Since macOS 26, your Mac keeps a clipboard history in Spotlight—and it may be all you need. Here's how to open it, where it stops, and what a dedicated clipboard manager adds.
The built-in answer
Open Spotlight with ⌘Space, then press ⌘4. Your recent copies—text, images, files—appear in the window, and you can search them and paste any of them again. The first time, Spotlight asks to turn the feature on.
On macOS 26.1 and later, System Settings → Spotlight chooses how long copies stay: 30 minutes, 8 hours, or 7 days, with a Clear Clipboard History button beside it. On 26.0, Spotlight keeps copies for 8 hours.
On macOS 15 and earlier the clipboard holds one item. Finder's Edit → Show Clipboard displays the current copy, and Universal Clipboard hands the latest item to your other Apple devices—useful, but not a history.
Where the built-in stops
Spotlight's history is a shelf, not an archive—seven days is the ceiling, and the default keeps copies for hours. It also recovers a copy exactly as you copied it: the paste lands as-is, rich formatting into a field that strips it anyway.
And there are no verbs. Spotlight can find a past copy. It can't give you the plain-text version for the field you're in, or reshape the copy for the app receiving it.
What CopyPasta adds
CopyPasta keeps this session's copies in memory on your machine so you can revisit them—nothing written to disk, nothing synced. Then it does the part a history can't. Press the paste shortcut and the clipboard arrives shaped for the destination app—a clean plain-text drop, or an AI rewrite on request.
Standard formatting is free and runs on your machine. Pro adds unlimited AI pastes.
Where Spotlight may fit better
If you want a week-long searchable history and nothing to install, set Spotlight's retention to 7 days (26.1 or later)—it's genuinely good. For a permanent, searchable archive, a tool built for recall like Maccy or Paste fits better. CopyPasta's history is the working session, not the archive: its job is the next paste.
| Feature | CopyPasta | macOS Spotlight |
|---|---|---|
| Clipboard history | † | |
| Structured field mapping | ||
| Text formatted for the receiving app | ||
| Natural-language text transformations | ‡ | |
| Text from images (OCR) | ||
| Spoken instructions while pasting | ||
| iPhone and iPad apps | ||
| macOS app | § | |
| Linux app | ||
| Windows app |
✓ marks a feature listed in the linked official source. The “—” mark means the source doesn't list it. 🚧 marks a CopyPasta feature in development. Sources checked: .
†CopyPasta keeps history only in memory on your machine. It's not persisted to disk or synced across devices.
‡Standard formatting runs on your machine. AI rewrites send copied text, your instruction, and relevant context to CopyPasta and AI providers. Privacy and trust
§CopyPasta ships cross-platform natively, not through Electron. Native packaging keeps the installer small at , idle CPU at 0.1%, and physical memory at 24 MiB. The latter two metrics are medians from five 60-second idle Activity Monitor samples on a MacBook Neo with Apple A18 Pro running macOS 27.0.