Quick start
clippal is mostly one panel and a handful of keys. Learn these six and you’ll have covered almost everything you’ll do in a day — the rest is written along the bottom of the panel, where you’ll find it when you need it.
For clippal v1.6.1 Updated August 12, 2026
Worth thirty seconds now, because everything else refers back to it.
Top — the strip
Search box, then filter chips: what you’re looking at (Archived · Keystrokes · Copied · Notes), then Shortcut, Bookmarked, Tagged and Images, then your tags and apps. Click one to narrow the list, or press ⌥1…⌥9 for the Nth chip — the row below shows which key is which.
Middle — the list
Your clips, newest first, with the selected one ringed. ↑↓ walks it, ⏎ pastes, ⌘1…⌘9 grabs the Nth without walking there.
Bottom — the hint bar
The keys available right now — and it changes as you move, so it’s worth a glance whenever you’re unsure. Spelled out further down.
⌥1 … ⌥9 — the chips by position
Hold Option and press a number to flip the Nth chip from the left — no need to walk into the strip first, and it leaves your cursor and your search text alone. Every chip below carries the key it answers to — hover one to see it. clippal does the same, floating the chip’s name and key above it.
The number is a position, not a fixed filter: chips only join the strip once you have a clip of that kind, and your tags shuffle by how recently you used them, so ⌥3 means “the third chip I can see”.
double-tap Option
Tap Option twice, quickly, from any app. The panel comes up over whatever you were doing with your whole history in it — start typing to narrow, ↑↓ to walk the list, ⏎ to paste back into the app you came from. Esc closes it. Nothing else needs to be running, and holding Option still works as a normal modifier.
You don't have to copy something for it to live here. ⌘N opens an empty clip in the preview pane — type a note, a signature, a snippet of boilerplate. Tab moves you Content → Tags → Shortcut, and ⌘S saves. While you're editing, the bottom bar turns into the buttons that matter: Save, Save as new, Discard.
type a tag, Enter adds it
Give a clip tags as you create it, or Tab to the Tags field of any clip and add them. Every tag you use becomes a chip in the strip along the top of the panel: click one — or press ⌥1…⌥9 for the Nth chip — and the list narrows to that tag. Chips stack, so two tags means clips carrying both.
type it in any app
Give a clip a keyword — ;sig, ;addr, whatever you'll remember — and from then on, typing that keyword in any app brings the clip to you. A small picker appears right where you're typing, showing the clip (or clips) behind that keyword; ⏎ inserts the one you pick, Esc leaves what you typed alone. Your clipboard is untouched, so ⌘V still pastes what you last copied.
⌘B stars the selected clip. Bookmarked clips get their own group at the top of the menu bar menu, so they're reachable without opening the panel at all, and the Bookmarked chip filters the list down to them. A bookmark is also a promise: bookmarked clips are never cleaned up, however old they get.
grab a row, drop it anywhere
Sometimes pasting isn't what you want. Drag a row out of the panel and drop it where you're headed — a chat box, a document, Finder. Text lands as text; an image lands as an actual file, not a path; a link dropped on a browser's tab bar opens the page. The panel steps aside while you drag and closes once the clip lands, just like a paste. Change your mind mid-air and Esc puts everything back.
There’s no shortcut here you have to memorise. The bar under the list always shows the keys that work right now, and it swaps as you move between the search box, the list, the chip strip and the editor. These are the four faces of it.
While you're typing in the search box
With a clip selected in the list
When the cursor is up in the chip strip
While you're editing a clip
Want the whole map at once? ⌘? opens it inside the panel, and holding ⌘ for a beat pops a card of just the ⌘ actions available in whatever you’re doing.
Switch on typed-text capture and clippal keeps the sentences you type, not just what you copy — so the draft that vanished when a page reloaded is still there. It’s off until you turn it on, in Settings → Privacy → Keystrokes, and that pane is where the limits live too: apps and sites to skip, terminals, a minimum length, patterns never to keep.
Once it’s on, typed clips sit in the same list as everything else, marked with a ✎. The chips at the top of the panel are how you separate them from your copies: every clip belongs to exactly one of four slices, and each chip blends its slice in or out. ⌘Y is the quick way to hide or show your typing.
More on this →
Things you've put away. Off by default — turn it on to blend them back in.
hidden by default
What you typed, if you've switched that on. ⌘Y is the quick toggle.
shown by default
Everything that came off your clipboard — the default reading of "history".
shown by default
Clips you bookmarked, tagged, gave a shortcut, or wrote here yourself.
shown by default
Hold ⌥V and a small overlay floats what you’re about to paste over your work. Keep holding to cycle back through your history — ⇧ with it goes the other way — and the moment you let go, the clip you landed on is pasted. Same result as ⌘V, minus the guessing about what’s on the clipboard.
One bit of setup: ⌥V ships unbound so it can’t collide with a key you already use. Bind it once under Settings → Shortcuts → “Toggle overlay” — ⌥V is the usual choice — and it works everywhere from then on.
More on this →Select text in any app and press ⌥Esc — a window follows along, sentence by sentence, while your Mac reads it.
More →Copies your selection, bookmarks it, and opens the panel on it, ready to tag or edit.
More →The full reference lives inside the panel. Hold ⌘ on its own for a card of just the ⌘ actions.
More →That’s the working set. When you want the detail — blocking an app, retention, backups, read-aloud controls, troubleshooting — the full reference covers every feature, and you can search it.