Everything clippal does, grouped by task. Jump to a section on the left, or search your question and the guide narrows to the matching answers.
Haven’t used it yet? Start with the visual quick start — six gestures, in pictures — and come back here for the detail.
For clippal v1.6.1 Updated August 12, 2026
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clippal is in public beta and goes out by email rather than as a download button on this site — that way the app only ever reaches you as a message from me, and I can help you get set up. Put your address in the request form on the product page and I send the build with setup steps, usually within a day.
Apple Silicon Macs (M-series) on a recent version of macOS. Intel support may come later. clippal is a native menu bar app — there is no browser extension and no companion service.
Your most recent clips (with a Bookmarked group above them) — click one to put it back on the clipboard. Below that: Search, Peek, a Triggers submenu listing every shortcut you've defined, Pause Capture, Clear History, Settings…, Keyboard Shortcuts… (which opens the full in-app reference), the version line with Check for Updates…, Restart clippal, and Quit clippal. The icon draws crossed out whenever capture is paused, or while the app you're in is one you've blocked.
Menu bar → Pause Capture, then For 5 minutes, For 15 minutes, For 1 hour, or Until Resumed. While paused, nothing you copy or type is recorded — it's skipped, not queued up and saved late. The menu item turns into Resume Capture with the time remaining, and the menu bar icon stays crossed out so you can tell at a glance.
clippal updates itself. It checks once a day and offers a new version from inside the app; one click downloads it (checksum-verified), installs it, and relaunches. You can also check on demand with Check for Updates…, turn the daily check off with Check for Updates Automatically, or use Skip This Version to quiet one release. Your history, settings and shortcuts carry across.
Yes — Settings → Service & Storage → “Launch at login.” The same pane shows how much space your history and images are using.
Double-tap the Option key — two clean taps in quick succession, with no other key held. Holding or single-tapping Option still works as a normal modifier, so nothing you already do changes. If you'd rather use a key combo, set one under Settings → Shortcuts → “Open search (combo, optional)”; you can keep both. Menu bar → Search opens it too. If text is selected in the app you're in, the panel opens with that text already in the search box.
Clip contents, image filenames and fetched link titles — plus your #tags, your ;shortcuts (the sigil is optional), and the app a clip came from, so typing “chrome” surfaces everything you copied out of Chrome. Results update as you type.
The cursor lives in one of two lanes. In the LIST lane, ↑↓ walks clips and ⏎ pastes. In the CHIPS lane, ←→ walks the filter strip and ⏎ toggles a chip on or off. Only the active lane shows a cursor. Tab moves from the list into the chips; ↓ from the chips drops back to the row you left. Per-clip actions (⌘B, ⌘E, ⌘⇧A, ⌘O, ⌘D) still act on that last-known clip even while you're in the chip strip.
Click selects a clip and shows its preview; double-click pastes it and closes. Right-click (or the ⋯ button) opens a context menu with Paste, Edit, Bookmark, Open, Archive and Delete. ⌘-click adds or removes a clip from a selection and ⇧-click picks a range. Drag a clip to drop it into another app; drag the panel's edge to move it. Clicking anywhere outside the panel closes it.
⌘+ and ⌘− scale the whole panel, not just the text, and ⌘0 puts it back. The setting sticks across launches. If the frosted-glass look is hard to read over a busy desktop, Settings → General → Appearance has “Solid background (no translucency).”
Select it and press ⏎ — the panel closes and the clip goes into whatever app you were in. ⌘1 through ⌘9 paste the 1st through 9th clip in the list directly, without walking to it first.
Yes — ⌘⏎ pastes into the app behind the panel and leaves the panel open, so you can paste one clip after another. Esc when you're done.
⌘-click or ⇧-click to pick several clips (⇧↑↓ extends a selection from the keyboard). ⏎ pastes them combined, using the join format you last chose. Merge and Delete buttons appear at the bottom of the panel; Merge asks how to join them — join format, reverse order, whether to delete the originals — and the merged clip inherits the tags, shortcuts and bookmarks of its parts.
Drag any row and drop it where you were headed — a chat box, a document, Figma, Mail. Text lands as text. An image lands as its actual file, so Finder and anything else expecting a file gets one instead of a path. A clip that names a file on disk hands over that file, and a link clip carries the URL too, so dropping it on a browser's tab bar opens the page. Multi-select comes along: pick several clips and drag them as one. The panel steps aside for the length of the drag and closes once the clip lands, the same as pasting. Press Esc mid-drag, or let go over something that won't take it, and the panel comes back exactly as it was.
Bind a key to it under Settings → Shortcuts → “Toggle overlay” (⌥V is the usual choice; it ships unbound so it can't collide with a key you already use). Hold it and a small overlay floats your latest clips over your work; keep holding to cycle back through history and let go to paste the one you landed on. ⇧ plus the same key cycles the other way.
⌘E opens the selected clip for editing in the preview pane — this is also where its tags and its shortcut live. ⌘S saves over the original, ⌘⇧S saves your edit as a new clip and leaves the original alone, and Esc cancels. Markdown is shown as styled source: the markers stay visible but recede, so what you save is exactly what you wrote. ⌘Z and ⇧⌘Z undo and redo inside the editor.
Yes — ⌘N opens an empty clip in the preview pane. Write it, Tab through to tags and a shortcut if you want them, and ⌘S saves. It behaves like any other clip from then on, and because it was written in clippal it counts as a note, so it's never auto-deleted.
⌘B bookmarks the selected clip (⌥C from anywhere copies the selection, bookmarks it, and opens the panel on it). Bookmarked clips get their own group at the top of the menu bar menu, and — like tagged clips, clips with a shortcut, and notes you wrote in clippal — they are exempt from every automatic clean-up.
Open a clip with ⌘E and Tab to the Tags field. Type a tag and press ⏎ to add it as a token; a dropdown offers matching tags you already use as you type, and ↓ on an empty field shows your most-used ones. The SUGGESTED pills under the field are click-to-add. Select a token and press Delete to remove it. Each tag keeps a stable colour, a tagged clip shows a blue #name (+N) flag at the right edge of its row, and every tag you use becomes a filter chip.
⌘⇧A hides a clip from every view while keeping it forever — nothing is deleted. It's for things you want out of the way but not gone. Turn on the Archived chip in the filter strip to blend archived clips back into the list, and ⌘⇧A on an archived clip unarchives it.
⌘D deletes the selected clip immediately, with no confirmation prompt — because ⌘Z undoes it for about ten seconds afterwards. Closing the panel finalises anything still pending. Clear History, in the menu bar menu, empties your plain copies while leaving bookmarked, tagged and shortcut-assigned clips in place.
⌘U cycles the sort: Relevance → Created → Updated → Most used. With an empty search box, Relevance orders by when a clip was last updated.
The strip has three zones, separated by faint rules. First the view toggles — Archived, Keystrokes, Copied, Notes — ghost pills that blend a whole slice of your clips into or out of the list; every clip belongs to exactly one slice, and a hidden slice's pill goes dim and struck through. Archived starts off, the other three start on. Then a fixed row that narrows whatever you're looking at: Shortcut, Bookmarked, Tagged, Images. Then everything else — the tags and apps you've used lately, ordered by when you last clicked them.
⌥1 … ⌥9 flip the chip at that position, counting from the left — no need to walk into the strip first, and it doesn't move your cursor or clear what you've typed. To find out which number a chip is, hover it: its name and its key (say “Copied ⌥3”) float in a bubble above it. The number is a position, not a fixed filter — chips join the strip only once you have a clip of that kind, and your tags reorder by recency, so it shifts with what you can actually see. ⌫ removes the most recently added filter (when the search box is empty), and Esc clears them all. From the chip lane, ⏎ toggles whatever's highlighted.
Yes, with AND: Bookmarked plus Shortcut gives you bookmarked clips that also have a typed trigger. Activating a chip from the moving zone floats it left into a Selected group so you can see what's applied, and typing in the search box floats name-matching chips to the front rather than hiding the rest.
Picking a tag refolds the strip to the tags that actually co-occur with it, so the next click always narrows something rather than emptying the list. Turn the tag off and the full strip comes back.
A trigger is a typed shortcut for a clip. Give a clip the trigger ;sig, and typing ;sig in any app replaces what you typed with that clip's contents. Your clipboard is left alone: clippal restores whatever you had copied about 150 ms after the paste, so ⌘V still pastes what you expect.
Type the trigger followed by a space, tab, return, or one of , . : ! ? ) ] — clippal deletes what you typed and pastes the clip. It only fires at the start of a word, so a trigger like mark never goes off inside “remarkable”; a sigil trigger like ;sig can fire anywhere, since ; isn't part of a word. A clip that has a trigger shows a teal ;name flag at the right edge of its row.
A small picker appears right where you're typing, listing the clips that carry that trigger. Walk it with the arrow keys and press ⏎, or click a row; Esc leaves what you typed exactly as it is. Link clips show their title and host with a favicon so they're easy to tell apart.
Yes. Typing a trigger while editing a clip pops the picker — always, even when only one clip matches, so a document is never rewritten without a confirmation — and the insertion is a normal undoable edit.
Menu bar → Triggers lists every one alphabetically; clicking an entry jumps the panel straight into editing that clip's shortcut. In the panel, the Shortcut chip filters the list down to clips that have one.
Three usual causes. The app you're in may be on the suggestions blocklist — code editors ship blocked by default, since a trigger word in source code is rarely what you meant (Settings → Privacy → Suggestions). You may be in a password or sudo prompt, where clippal always stands down. Or global shortcuts are down altogether, in which case the menu bar shows a warning item — see Troubleshooting.
clippal fetches the page's title, description, image and favicon in the background and shows them as a card in the preview, so a history full of URLs is something you can tell apart. Link rows carry their own quiet hue in the list. ⌘O opens the selected clip: the page it was copied from if that was captured, otherwise the URL itself — and for a short piece of plain text, a web search for it. Link previews can be turned off in Settings → General.
Copied images are captured and shown as previews you can rename, tag and drag out as a real file. Identical images are stored once. Settings → General has “Capture images” and “Auto-import screenshots saved to disk,” so a screenshot you take lands in your history even though it never touched the clipboard. The Images chip filters the list to them.
If you turn typed-text capture on, clippal keeps what you type as searchable clips — so the draft that vanished when a page reloaded is still recoverable. They carry a ✎ glyph and are blended into the main list; ⌘Y hides or shows them, and the Keystrokes chip does the same. This is off by default and worth reading the Privacy section before switching on.
Because you used it. Anything you paste, expand, drag out or otherwise send out of clippal has been on your clipboard, so it moves from Keystrokes into Copied. Editing a clip isn't using it, and leaves it where it was.
Any clip you bookmarked, tagged, gave a shortcut, or wrote inside clippal. Notes are the things you decided to keep, so they're never touched by automatic clean-up, and the Notes chip brings just those into view.
Yes — a clip that is a colour literal (#hex, rgb(…)) shows the actual colour as a swatch in its row, which makes a run of hex codes far easier to scan.
Select text in any app and press ⌥Esc. A read-along window opens and speaks it, lighting up the part it's reading. ⌥Esc again pauses and resumes; Esc stops (bare Esc is only intercepted while speech is actually running). The feature can be switched off entirely under Settings → General → “Enable speak selection.”
⌥, and ⌥. move back and forward, and ⌥< and ⌥> slow down and speed up. Inside the read-along window, ← and → step by whatever unit the highlight uses: with sentence highlighting, ← replays the sentence you're in and pressing it again goes to the previous one. Speech starts at 1.6× and can run from 0.5× to 3×.
Settings → General → “Read-along highlight” offers Word, Line, Sentence and Paragraph. Sentence is the default. The highlight reflows when you zoom the window with ⌘+ / ⌘−.
Because text is written for the eye. clippal speaks a transcript rather than the literal characters: 3–5 becomes “3 to 5”, 1920x1080 “1920 by 1080”, 25°C degrees, ½ “a half”, and ≈ ± ÷ ≤ the words you'd actually say. Everyday shorthand is spelled out (pls, thx, btw, w/o, kg, km, mph), Rs. 500 is read as rupees the way $500 is read as dollars, names the synthesiser mangles (macOS, nginx, kubectl, JPEG) are respelled, and acronyms you say as words (JSON, NASA) stop being read letter by letter. A run of emoji or !!! is spoken once, a --- divider becomes a pause, and footnote markers like [12] are skipped. The highlight follows the words you hear.
Most apps expose the selected text to macOS directly. Electron-based apps (VS Code, Cursor and friends) don't, so clippal falls back to a silent copy and puts your clipboard back afterwards. If a selection still can't be read, nothing is spoken rather than something wrong being read.
macOS's speech engine is heavy — a couple of hundred megabytes once it has been used. clippal lets go of it after 7.5 minutes of not speaking, without restarting the app or interrupting anything. Restart clippal from the menu bar if you want that back immediately.
It puts the mouse pointer where you're typing. It lands on the caret itself in apps that expose one, or in the middle of a single-line field like a search box or address bar when that's all there is — and it deliberately does nothing rather than guess when the front app offers neither, so it can never fling the pointer somewhere random. It works across displays.
Settings → Shortcuts. Combine modifiers (cmd, ctrl, opt, shift, fn) with a letter or one of esc, comma, period — for example opt+v. Separate multiple bindings with a comma. Leave a field empty to clear that shortcut (worth doing for ⌥J if you want ⌥J's ∆ character back). Shortcut changes apply after a restart, which the pane tells you.
clippal reads and saves them the Mac way — opt+c, opt+esc, opt+j — because that's what the key says. alt, option and ⌥ are all still accepted when you type them, and get rewritten to opt, so old settings and Apple keyboards that print “alt” both work.
Two, in fact. ⌘? (or ⌘/) in the panel opens the complete reference — every key, grouped by what it does. And holding ⌘ for a moment pops a compact card of just the ⌘ actions available in whatever mode you're in. Menu bar → Keyboard Shortcuts… is the way in if you don't have the panel open yet.
A ghost-text chip near your cursor that suggests what you're likely typing next, built from your own clipboard and typed history — no cloud model. Press → to take the next word, Tab to take the whole chain. Turn it on or off under Settings → Privacy → Suggestions → “Show inline word predictions (HUD chip).” It learns from your text clips; typed-text capture deepens the pool but isn't required.
On your Mac, in ~/.config/clippal (the history database sits there next to the log). There is no server, no account, and no sync. Nothing about your clips is sent anywhere — the only network requests clippal makes are fetching a link preview for a URL you copied, and checking whether a new version exists.
Password-manager entries, which mark themselves concealed; clipboard writes apps flag as transient; anything typed into a secure-input field, such as a password or sudo prompt; and clippal's own windows. The secure-input and own-app rules are absolute — no setting and no blocklist entry can switch them off. Settings → General also has “Skip concealed items (passwords)” and “Skip transient items,” both on by default.
Settings → Privacy → Blocking → “Block completely.” Type an app's name, a website, or a pattern and press ⏎. Exact matches (instagram.com), wildcards (*insta*) and /regex/ all work, and rules are matched against app names as well as URLs. A rule here blocks everything for that app or site: clipboard, typed capture and suggestions.
Yes — the Privacy pane's tabs are the tiers. “Keystrokes → Don't record typing here” stops typed capture while clipboard and suggestions keep working. “Suggestions → Don't suggest here” stands trigger expansion and inline predictions down while capture keeps working; code editors ship on this list. A rule in “Block completely” implies both.
Settings → Privacy → Blocking → Special contexts. In private/incognito windows, clipboard capture stays on by default while typed capture and suggestions are off; each is a separate toggle. “Don't record typed text in terminals” covers Terminal, iTerm2, Ghostty, Warp, Alacritty and kitty in one switch — terminals keep clipboard capture, because you copy out of them constantly, but their typing holds commands and secrets.
Turn on Settings → Privacy → Blocking → Website matching → “Detect the current website in browsers,” which lets a rule like instagram.com apply while you type rather than only when a URL passes through the clipboard. “Use AppleScript for exact URLs” makes it precise, at the cost of macOS asking once whether clippal may control your browser; with it off, clippal reads what the accessibility API gives it and never prompts. The log records once per app that website blocking is live, so you can confirm it rather than infer it.
It's under Settings → Privacy → Keystrokes → “Capture typed text,” and it's off until you turn it on. Be deliberate: it records sentences you type system-wide so they're searchable later, which is effectively a keylogger on your own machine. The gates in that pane are there to be used first — a minimum sentence length, an entropy ceiling that skips things that look like keys or passwords, the per-app and per-site exclusions, the terminal switch, and the sensitive-content filter.
Settings → Privacy → Keystrokes → “Forget all typed text…” deletes every captured sentence from the local database and tells you how many went. Typed sentences you'd bookmarked, tagged or given a shortcut are kept — you'd turned those into notes.
Settings → Privacy → Filters & Sources → “Sensitive content filter.” Anything matching one of your patterns is dropped before it's written, whether it was typed or copied, and you can apply it to typed text, clipboard items, or both. Patterns are one per line in Python regex syntax — useful for things an app blocklist can't catch, like an email address you type into Notes.
Only if you let it, and only for command names: Settings → Privacy → Filters & Sources → “Learn command names from shell history” reads ~/.zsh_history or ~/.bash_history once at launch and keeps the names of commands so your own CLI tools are recognised as runnable in the trigger picker. Full command lines are never kept and nothing from your history becomes a clip.
No — plain copies age out on a schedule you set in Settings → Retention: separate day counts for short text, long text (with the threshold you consider “long”), images, and keystroke captures, plus a maximum number of clips. 0 means keep forever. Anything you bookmarked, tagged, gave a shortcut, or wrote in clippal is exempt from all of it, which the pane says as plainly as it can: “Notes are kept forever.”
Settings → Backup → “Back up automatically (plain CSV)” runs on the interval you choose and writes to ~/Library/Application Support/ClipPal/Backups by default — a folder you can point a cloud provider at if you want off-machine copies. A backup is a readable folder: clips.csv, an images folder, a manifest, optionally your settings. It is not encrypted, so pick a location you trust. clippal keeps the two most recent. “Back Up Now” runs one on demand.
You choose, under Backup → Include. Bookmarked clips, snippets and their triggers, tagged clips, and settings are included by default; full clipboard history, typed-text captures, and images are opt-in — images because each backup copies every image file, which adds up. Tags, shortcuts and bookmarks always travel with the clips in clips.csv.
Settings → Backup → “Restore from Backup…”, point it at a backup folder, and it merges: clips are de-duplicated by content and nothing already in your history is deleted. That makes it safe to run on a machine that has been in use, and it's how you move to a new Mac.
That's the point of the format. Open clips.csv in Google Sheets, Numbers or Excel — or hand it to an AI agent — and sort, dedupe, retag or rewrite rows in bulk, then restore the file. Because restore merges rather than replaces, nothing you kept in the meantime is lost.
The menu bar tells you which of the three things it is, and only shows the item when something is actually wrong: “⚠️ Shortcuts Disabled — Fix…” means the Accessibility permission is missing or the key tap died, “⚠️ Shortcuts Blocked — Why?…” means another app is holding Secure Input, and “No Shortcuts Bound — Set Up…” means there's nothing bound to press. Click it for the full diagnosis and a link straight to the right settings pane.
The permission has gone stale — macOS is still showing the checkbox as on while having quietly revoked it. Fix: System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility, remove clippal with the – button, add it back with +, and relaunch clippal. This happens once when upgrading from a build older than 1.4.0; normal updates keep the permission now.
Check the menu bar icon first: crossed out means capture is paused (Resume Capture brings it back) or the app you're in is blocked. Otherwise it's usually a rule doing its job — an entry under Privacy → Blocking, a private browsing window, a terminal, or a sensitive-content pattern. Password-manager and secure-input content is never captured by design.
Two possibilities. Typed-text capture is off unless you turned it on (Settings → Privacy → Keystrokes). Or it's on and the captures are simply hidden — ⌘Y toggles them in the list, as does the Keystrokes chip. Remember that using a keystroke clip promotes it into Copied, so look there too.
It comes back on its own within about half a second, and every revival is written to the log. Repeated fast crashes back off and eventually stop trying rather than looping forever. Quitting deliberately — the Quit item, logging out, shutting down — never triggers a relaunch. If clippal has vanished from your menu bar and not come back, the log is the place to look.
~/.config/clippal/clippal.log, with update-specific messages in update.log beside it. Every automatic decision leaves a line there — a crash revival, a stale permission, whether website blocking is live — so it's worth attaching when you report something.
Read aloud is the usual reason: macOS's speech engine stays resident once used, and clippal releases it after 7.5 minutes idle. Restart clippal from the menu bar to reclaim it at once. Steady growth over days isn't expected — 1.6.0 fixed the leaks behind it — so if you see it, the log and a note about what you were doing are genuinely useful to me.
Reply to the email your build came in — it reaches me directly, and during the beta that's the fastest route. Include what you were doing and, if the app misbehaved, the last few lines of ~/.config/clippal/clippal.log.
Still stuck? The product page covers the beta itself, or ask for the beta if you haven’t got it yet.