A macOS menu-bar clipboard with memory
Your Mac forgets on every copy. ClipChrono doesn’t.
Everything you copy — text, images, and files — lands in a searchable history that lives in your menu bar. Press ⌘⇧V anywhere, find that thing from last Tuesday, click, and it's pasted right where you were. Folders keep the snippets you reuse forever. Nothing ever leaves your Mac.
§ 01 — copy to pasted, four beats
One shortcut, one click. No app switch, no mouse hunt.
ClipChrono records quietly from the menu bar. When you need something back, the panel opens over whatever you're doing and puts it back under your cursor.
01 / COPY
Like you always do
Every copy — text, images, and files — is captured, up to 500 items, deduplicated so re-copies never double-stack.
02 / SUMMON
From any app
The panel pops over your work. Don't like the combo? Record any shortcut in Settings.
03 / FIND
Search as you type
Live filtering across the whole history — or jump straight to a folder of keepers.
04 / PASTE
Right where you were
One click auto-pastes into the app you came from. Grant Accessibility once when asked.
§ 02 — built for the things you copy twice
A history for the stream, folders for the keepers.
01 / FOLDERS
Snippets that never expire
Hover a clip → 📁 → pick or create a folder — one per project, "CLI", "SQL", whatever you reuse. Foldered clips leave the history stream and are exempt from the item cap, auto-expiry, and Clear. Switch folders from the dropdown next to search.
02 / SEARCH
Find last Tuesday’s copy
Live search across up to 500 items — text and images both. Deduplication ignores invisible-whitespace differences, so the same snippet copied five times is one entry, not five.
03 / PINS + BULK
Pins survive Clear
📌 the items you paste every day and they stay at the top through every cleanup. When the stream gets noisy, ⌘-click several items and delete them together — or Clear everything except pins and folders.
04 / YOUR RULES
Record any shortcut
Click the shortcut field in Settings and press your combo — anything with ⌘, ⌃ or ⌥. Conflicts keep your previous shortcut instead of breaking it. Plus: history size, auto-delete for unused items, start-at-login.
§ 03 — clips that know what they are
Links, code, and files — handled like they should be.
01 / LINKS
Copy a URL, open it anywhere
A copied link shows its domain up front, with an open-in-browser button right on the clip. Detection is offline — the URL is never fetched or phoned home.
02 / CODE
Snippets keep their shape
Multi-line code is rendered in a monospace block with indentation and line breaks preserved — a function you copied still looks like a function when you find it again.
03 / FILES
Copy a file, paste it back later
Copy a file in Finder and it lands in history as a reference — paste it into another folder, an email, or an upload field hours later. The file itself never moves; if the original is deleted, the clip greys out.
04 / BACKUP
Export once, restore anywhere
Settings → Export writes your whole history, folders, and pins to a single file. Import merges it back on any Mac — duplicates are skipped and nothing you already have is overwritten.
§ 04 — your clipboard is your business
Everything stays on your Mac.
A clipboard manager sees passwords, contracts, and half-written messages. That's why ClipChrono is local-only by design: no cloud, no sync, no telemetry, no account. There is nothing to opt out of.
Items copied from password managers that mark them confidential are never recorded at all — they don't enter the history, even for a second.
The entire archive is a folder in your Library you can inspect, back up, or delete. Uninstalling removes everything — two commands, documented in the docs.
§ 05 — read before installing
Honest about the fine print.
macOS only, Node 22.12+. ClipChrono installs through npm and downloads its Electron runtime (~100 MB) once, on first install. After that the terminal is never needed again — it lives in the menu bar and starts at login.
Auto-paste needs Accessibility. Pasting into the app you came from requires a one-time Accessibility grant. In that macOS dialog the app appears as "Electron" — that's ClipChrono's runtime, and it's expected.
History is a stream, not a vault. The stream keeps the newest 500 items (configurable) and can auto-expire unused ones. Anything you want to keep forever belongs in a 📁 folder — folders are exempt from the cap, expiry, and Clear.
Local means local. There is no automatic cloud sync — moving between Macs is a manual Export/Import of a backup file you control. The flip side: your clipboard history stays in ~/Library/Application Support/ClipChrono and nowhere else on Earth unless you export it yourself.