What Maccy is
Maccy is a clipboard manager for macOS. It runs in your menu bar, captures everything you copy, and gives it back to you instantly with a keyboard shortcut. Press ⌘⇧C from any app, type a word, press Return. That is the whole product.
No subscription. No account. No cloud by default. No telemetry. No ads. The clipboard history lives on your Mac, accessible only to you. The source code is public and auditable at github.com/p0deje/Maccy.
Why it exists
The macOS clipboard holds exactly one item. Copy something new, and the previous item is gone. This has been true since the first Macintosh. For developers copying stack traces, writers researching multiple sources, or anyone who pastes more than once per day, this is a persistent friction point.
Maccy was created because the existing solutions in 2018 were either too expensive, too bloated, or required accounts and cloud storage for a fundamentally local problem. A clipboard manager should be fast, simple, and private. Maccy is exactly that.
The design philosophy
Maccy is deliberately minimal. The feature set is: search your history, pin important items, exclude sensitive apps, configure a keyboard shortcut. That covers what 99% of users need. There are no pinboards, no visual timelines, no subscription tiers, no team sharing, no AI features. Every addition that does not directly serve the core use case — retrieving what you copied — is a distraction.
This restraint is a feature, not a limitation. On an M4 Mac with 3,000 items in history, Maccy uses 14–22 MB of RAM and opens the popup in under 65 milliseconds. It stays out of the way until you need it.
Open source commitment
Maccy is released under the MIT licence. This is not marketing language. MIT means you can read the code, modify it, compile it yourself, redistribute it, and use it in any context — commercial or otherwise — without asking. The MIT licence cannot be revoked. Maccy cannot be made proprietary after the fact.
The practical implication: if the project were ever abandoned or sold, the existing codebase would remain free. You could always compile the last known-good version yourself. No vendor lock-in is possible.
Privacy as a first principle
Clipboard data is sensitive. It contains passwords, private messages, personal information, and confidential work. Any tool that records this data has a serious responsibility.
Maccy stores clipboard history exclusively on your Mac. It does not send data to any server, does not require an account, and does not report analytics. The only optional network activity is iCloud sync, which you explicitly enable and which uses Apple's encrypted infrastructure.
The app ships with a default ignore list that blocks password managers (1Password, Bitwarden, Dashlane, and others) so that credentials never enter the history. The ignore list is fully configurable. See the privacy policy and privacy review for full details.
Compatibility
Maccy 2.7.3 is a universal binary that runs natively on Apple Silicon (M1 through M5) and Intel Macs. It requires macOS 14 Sonoma or later. It is signed with an Apple Developer certificate and notarised by Apple, so it runs on all Macs without Gatekeeper warnings or manual trust overrides.