Maccy search and regex guide

Searching is just typing

There is no separate search box to focus. Open your history and type — Maccy narrows the list live as you go, across text, links, and more. Press ↵ to paste the top match. For most lookups, a few characters are enough.

Search modes

Maccy offers different matching behaviours, selectable in Settings → Search. Choose the one that fits how you think:

Fuzzy

Matches characters in order even if they are not adjacent, so gh can find GitHub. Forgiving and fast — the best default for everyday use when you remember roughly what you copied.

Exact

Matches the literal substring you type. Use it when fuzzy returns too many loose matches and you know the precise text, such as a specific order number or token.

Regular expression

Matches a pattern rather than fixed text — powerful for structured data. A few practical patterns:

• \d{6} — find clips containing a six-digit code (handy for one-time codes you copied).
• https?:// — surface URLs in your history.
• @\w+\. — locate things that look like email addresses.
• ^SELECT — find SQL snippets that start with SELECT.

Regex mode rewards a little practice and is a genuine time-saver for developers and anyone working with patterned text.

Tips for finding clips fast

• Pin frequent snippets so you rarely need to search for them at all (pinning guide).
• Keep a generous history size so older clips are still searchable.
• Use exact or regex mode when fuzzy is too broad; switch back to fuzzy for casual recall.
• Search works on the visible content, so distinctive words beat common ones — type the rarest word you remember.

Maccy stays fast even with large histories, so there is no penalty for keeping a lot to search through. New here? See Maccy for beginners.

How Maccy’s search works

When you open Maccy and start typing, it filters your clipboard history in real time. The search is instant — even with 3,000+ items, results appear as you type each character. Maccy searches the full text content of every item, not just the beginning.

Basic search tips

• Type anywhere in the text: searching “gmail” finds “[email protected]”, “gmail settings”, any URL containing gmail, etc.
• Case-insensitive by default: “ERROR” and “error” return the same results
• Partial matches: “config” finds “configuration”, “~/config/”, “nginx.conf”
• Multi-word: “api key” finds items containing both “api” and “key” (not necessarily adjacent)

Enabling regex search

Regex search is disabled by default. To enable it:

1. Open Maccy Preferences → Search
2. Enable Use regular expressions

Once enabled, any search query is treated as a regex pattern. Standard keyword search still works if the query is a valid but non-special regex string (e.g. “error” behaves identically with or without regex enabled).

Regex search examples

These are the most useful patterns for clipboard history search:

Fuzzy search vs exact search

By default, Maccy uses fuzzy matching: “gcm” can match “git commit -m”. This makes short queries very powerful for reaching long clipboard items quickly.

With regex enabled, matching becomes exact (no fuzzy logic). Your pattern must match the actual text. If you enable regex and find that searches return fewer results, try your query without special characters first.

Search performance with large histories

Maccy stores history in an SQLite database with indexed full-text search. Even with 10,000+ items, search is typically under 50ms. Regex search is slightly slower than plain text search because each item must be matched against the full pattern rather than an index lookup. In practice, the difference is imperceptible.

Keyboard navigation in search results

• ↓ / ↑ — move between results
• Return — paste the selected item
• ⌘Return — paste as plain text (strips formatting)
• ⌘P — pin the selected item
• ⌘Delete — delete the selected item from history
• Escape — close without pasting