I recently found myself assisting my sister with a research project. Writing a science paper is a notoriously taxing process because it is excruciatingly drab to write one, but at the same time, you have to be meticulous with every single statement. Citations are a crucial element, and depending on the topic you have picked, you may have to sprinkle a few links in every line.
In my case, my citation list had over 140 links, a healthy few of which were open across different tabs and pushing Chrome to its limits. Yet, the most arduous part was not the struggling web browser, but the chore of cycling through tabs, merely to copy the URL or citation details from each research paper.
It was a test of patience because macOS lacks something as fundamentally essential as a native clipboard, even though it offers a universal clipboard perk. I eventually gave up, shifted my workflow to Windows, and blissfully fired up the Win+V shortcut to access the native clipboard manager.
Soon after, I found myself on a wild goose chase for a decent macOS clipboard that doesn’t cost a bomb and covers the basics. The search landed me at Maccy, an open-source clipboard manager for macOS that is now my top recommendation for every Mac user.
Why Maccy?
My colleague, Alex Blake, is an ardent fan of Paste, a pretty powerful macOS clipboard manager. But I was still pretty skeptical about giving it a try, not because it was a $9.99 purchase. Instead, I wasn’t sure if I wanted something as powerful as Paste.
My prerequisite was an app that keeps things clean and simple. After hunting through a few dozen Reddit posts and forum posts, I landed on the GitHub page of Maccy, an open-source project run by Alex Rodionov. Why did I put my trust in it?
It has over a million downloads logged on GitHub, to begin with. It has all the signs of a beloved community project. In the span of the past four years, the open-source community has made over two thousand contributions to the project to fix things and add more polish to the clipboard manager.
The only requirement is that your Mac must be running macOS Sonoma, or a later build. You can download the app directly from its app repository for free, take the Homebrew route, purchase it from the dedicated website, or install it from the Mac App Store. Apple’s app repository will charge you $9.99 for the app, but I recommend installing it directly from the website and getting it at half the price.
How does Maccy work?
Setting up Maccy is a fairly straightforward process. If you are downloading it directly (and not via the App Store), you need to give a trust permission before it is installed. Once installed, it is saved as a dedicated shortcut in the right half of the menu bar at the top.
Every time you hit the Command + C shortcut, the selected content is saved on the clipboard. By default, the clipboard can be opened with a Command + Shift + C (⌘+⇧+C) shortcut, but you can customize it to your liking.
For my workflow, I found that it overlaps with the identical Google Docs shortcut for checking the word count, so I set my Maccy clipboard to a similar Control + Shift + C keyboard combo.
If you don’t use Docs and get work done on any other platform, you don’t have to go through any custom shortcut hassle, either. You only need to remember the ⌘+⇧+C combo. That’s it. There’s no further learning curve involved, and you’re good to go.
Of course, in the true spirit of a power user, you can take a look at the user guide and pick up a few other shortcuts to speed up your workflow. But for the fundamental chore of summoning a clipboard and pulling the desired entry, Maccy will get the job done in its most primal shape.
If you prefer the good ‘ol cursor-click route, just click on the leaf icon in the menu bar, and it will open the Maccy clipboard. The nine most recent items on your clipboard are listed in the drop-down window with numerical shortcuts, followed by other items appearing in chronological order.
All you need to do is click on a copied item and follow it up with the paste command (or key shortcut) in the desired position. You can avoid the click route entirely and just go ahead with a format like Command + Number (such as ⌘+4) for any clipboard item in the list.
Minor, but meaningful conveniences
When you hover over any entry in the Maccy clipboard list, you can see the source from which it was lifted, how many times it has been copied so far, and the last (and first) time it was used.
The best part about Maccy? A native search field at the top. Going a step further, the app actually lets you specify the search function behaviour. Want to search only the exact matching word, or give it the flexibility to find broadly matching items? You can do both.
Maccy lets you pick between four types of clipboard search functionalities depending on your needs. You can even customize the paste behavior. By default, when you click or press Enter on any item in the clipboard list, it is pasted to the macOS clipboard.
You need to follow it up with a paste command at the desired spot where the cursor is currently resting. However, you can skip this intermediate step and directly paste the selected content by enabling the “paste automatically” feature in the Preferences dashboard for Maccy.
Now, let’s say the list of copied items is getting too long, and all you need is about a dozen items at quick disposal. You can either delete the non-necessary items and keep the top nine items available for shortcut entry, or pin what you need the most at the top.
Now, like any sane person, I prefer to copy items from my reference sources without any formatting, so that the copied item blends seamlessly with the text document I am currently working on. Maccy will serve you just fine if you like to copy the formatting style, too.
If you’re used to the triple-key shortcut for directly copying text items without formatting, you may notice some overlaps with the document processor of your choice. In my case, the Command + Shift + C and the Command + Shift + V shortcuts run into that undesirable situation.
Thankfully, Maccy also offers a direct setting that you can check to enable content paste without formatting for every item on your clipboard. It’s a lovely sigh of relief. Maccy also offers the flexibility of clearing things en masse and or temporarily disabling saves on the Maccy clipboard to keep things from getting needlessly crowded.
Just the right dose of flexibility
On the privacy front, you can set up Maccy to delete all copied content every time you quit the app. While at it, you can also choose to wipe the native directory when you are done using the clipboard tool.
Going a step further, you can create exceptions for copying and saving items from certain apps in the Maccy clipboard. For example, if you are copying credentials from the pre-installed Passwords app or any other app where sensitive material is saved, you can add them to the exception list with a few clicks.
Maccy can save text, images, and files to the keyboard. You can customize this capability, as well, letting it save only a certain kind of content to keep things from getting chaotic or hogging precious system resources. You can also control the number of items that can be saved to the clipboard, though it is set at 200 entries by default.
What I like the most about Maccy is the app’s clean approach. It keeps things from getting too technical, but isn’t exactly barebones either. If you are looking for a quick and light utility that can handle your clipboard duties on a Mac, Maccy is the app I can recommend without any functional caveats.
The fact that it’s open-source and has a thriving community of contributors is just an added reassurance that the app will keep improving down the road. You can choose to download it without pinching your wallet, or simply run a Homebrew build with your own deep set of customizations.
The best of both worlds, as they call it!
