Clipth

The local-first clipboard manager for macOS — with offline semantic search and a built-in MCP server for your AI tools.

English · 中文 · clipth.app

Get started

1. Download the DMG and drag Clipth to Applications.
2. Press ⌘⇧V anywhere to open your history.
3. (Optional) Settings → AI → one click to connect Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and 12 more via MCP.

Why Clipth?

• Local-first — history, OCR text, tags, and embeddings stay on your Mac. Encrypted sync stays off until you turn it on.
• Search by meaning, offline — Apple NLEmbedding, no cloud embedding API.
• AI-native — the app binary is an MCP server your tools can call.
• Secrets auto-redacted — API keys and phone numbers are masked in the UI, exports, and MCP. The original stays on your Mac.
• Encrypted sync that merges — iCloud Drive, WebDAV, S3-compatible storage, or a folder you choose, with AES-256-GCM.
• Truly native — SwiftUI menu bar app, with Quick Paste, widgets, previews, and snippets.
• Privacy controls — pause capture, exclude source apps, ignore sensitive pasteboard markers, strip URL trackers, disable MCP tools, and delete history.

The name comes from “clip path”: a trail of things you copied.

Preview

These screenshots show the Chinese interface.

Main window · list	Main window · grid
Quick Paste	MCP in Settings

More screenshots

Filters

Widgets

Link preview

Features

Capture and Reuse

• Auto-captures text, images, video, files, URLs, and rich text
• Double-click to copy an entry back to the clipboard
• Duplicate refresh keeps re-copied items at the top instead of creating duplicates
• Optional paste-as-plain-text and trailing-whitespace trimming
• Soft-delete trash with restore, permanent delete, and retention controls
• Global hotkeys for the main window and snippets
• Efficient image storage — clipboard images are kept compressed with external binary storage, so memory and disk usage stay low even with a long image history
• Switch between list and grid layouts: the main window uses a responsive grid, while Quick Paste and the menu bar panel offer independently configurable two-column grids in Settings. Grid image previews preserve their aspect ratio and show the image name as an in-place overlay.

Search and Organization

• Full-text search with type filters
• Offline semantic search over text and OCR content
• Source-app and time filters such as app:Safari, since:2d, and before:2026-05-01
• Favorites, pinned clips, tags, custom titles, and tag autocomplete
• Multi-select merge for clips of the same type

Content Awareness

• Rich preview popover
• OCR indexing for images
• Smart text parsing for timestamps, Base64, and JSON
• Video preview with thumbnail or inline player mode
• URL tracking-parameter stripping for utm_*, fbclid, gclid, and more
• Screen-recording hide mode for the app window

Content Protection

• Automatic, conservative redaction of sensitive spans: Chinese mainland phone numbers (13812345678 → 138****5678) and API keys, tokens, secrets, and passwords — labeled values such as appkey=… plus high-confidence prefixes like sk-, ghp_, AKIA
• Masks only the sensitive value while keeping surrounding labels and structure; conservative enough to leave UUIDs, hashes, timestamps, and ordinary URLs untouched
• Redacted display across the history list, previews, menu bar, Dynamic Island, Quick Paste, Quick Look, and search snippets, with a lock badge on protected clips
• The original value is never modified in storage — copy, quick paste, paste-as-plain-text, and edits still use the raw clip
• Default exports and MCP responses return redacted content with isProtected metadata; raw egress requires an explicit opt-in
• Master switch and one editable rule list in Settings → Data → Privacy: the built-in phone/app-key rules can be edited, reset, or turned off, alongside your own keyword or regex rules

Export and Stats

• JSON export with type, date, favorite, and pinned filters
• Per-item export to original formats such as text and PNG
• Copy statistics, 14-day chart, and GitHub-style yearly heatmap

Encrypted sync that merges, not overwrites

Clipth does not replace one Mac's entire database with another. It sends encrypted incremental operations, merges each field independently, and keeps a recoverable copy when two devices change non-mergeable content.

Choose automatic sync or keep it manual. The main window always exposes a compact sync state: one-click sync when automation is off, an immediate in-progress indicator, and explicit success or failure feedback when the run finishes.

What happens	How Clipth protects it
Two Macs edit different fields	Hybrid logical clocks and field versions preserve both changes
Both devices write at once	Immutable encrypted journals survive the snapshot race
Tags or group membership change independently	Convergent set merging combines additions and preserves removals
A device returns with stale data	Acknowledged tombstones prevent deleted clips from silently reappearing

Everything is encrypted locally with AES-256-GCM before it reaches iCloud Drive, WebDAV, S3-compatible storage, or your chosen sync folder. The losing version is retained as an encrypted conflict copy for 30 days, while old journals and orphan attachments are cleaned conservatively. Read the sync architecture →

• Optional bidirectional sync through iCloud Drive, WebDAV, S3-compatible object storage, or a local folder (including folders managed by Dropbox, OneDrive, Syncthing, and network drives)
• Manual or automatic sync with a compact main-window status, immediate progress feedback, and clear success or failure notifications
• AES-256-GCM end-to-end encryption before data leaves the Mac; WebDAV passwords, S3 secret credentials, and the 256-bit recovery key are stored in Keychain
• Hybrid logical clocks merge independently edited fields; tags and group membership use convergent set merging, while losing content is retained as a 30-day conflict copy
• Encrypted incremental journals protect concurrent writers and compact into conditional-write snapshots; acknowledged deletion tombstones, old journals, and orphan attachments are garbage-collected conservatively
• Syncs history, images, tags, groups, favorites, pins, trash state, and individual file attachments up to 25 MB; device settings, statistics, and semantic vectors remain local
• Another Mac needs the same recovery key. Losing it makes existing remote data unrecoverable.
• Existing v1 manifests are upgraded in place on the next successful sync; the recovery key is reused and the remote .clipth-sync-v1 location stays stable for Clipth releases.

MCP Server

The app binary doubles as an MCP stdio server.

One-click setup. Settings → AI lists the agents actually installed on your Mac — CLIs and apps alike — and writes the entry into their config file for you. Supported: Claude Code, Codex CLI, Claude Desktop, Cursor, OpenClaw, VS Code, Zed, Windsurf, Gemini CLI, opencode, Qwen Code, Cline, Kiro, LM Studio, and Amazon Q CLI. The original file is backed up alongside it as .clipth.bak, comments and formatting are preserved, and each client's own syntax is used (Codex is TOML, VS Code keys the map servers, Zed uses context_servers, opencode takes command as an array). Restart the client afterwards so it picks Clipth up.

Import never writes straight away: it opens a confirmation dialog showing the exact edit — the affected lines of that config file, in that file's own syntax, with the additions highlighted — and nothing is written until you confirm. Each row can also open its config file in Quick Look or hand it to your editor.

To configure a client by hand instead:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "clipth": {
      "command": "/Applications/Clipth.app/Contents/MacOS/Clipth",
      "args": ["--mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Codex uses TOML rather than JSON — in ~/.codex/config.toml:

[mcp_servers.clipth]
command = "/Applications/Clipth.app/Contents/MacOS/Clipth"
args = ["--mcp"]

MCP tools

Tool	Description
search_clipboard	Keyword or semantic search over clipboard history
list_recent	List recent entries, optionally filtered by type
get_clip	Fetch one entry by UUID with full content and metadata
list_tags	List all tags and usage counts
list_recent_activity	List entries added since an ISO date or relative time such as 30m, 2h, 3d, 1w
tag_clip / untag_clip	Add or remove tags
favorite_clip / pin_clip	Update favorite or pinned state
delete_clip / restore_clip	Soft-delete, permanently delete, or restore entries
create_snippet	Create a snippet with optional title and tags

Protected clips are redacted in MCP responses by default and carry isProtected metadata; returning raw protected content requires an explicit opt-in in Settings → Data → Privacy. MCP can still expose other clipboard contents to the client you configure — read PRIVACY.md before enabling it for sensitive workflows.

Install

Download the latest DMG from clipth.app, open it, and drag Clipth into Applications.

macOS says the app can't be opened?

Public releases are signed with a stable self-signed identity so Accessibility permission can survive updates. They are not notarized yet; notarization is on the roadmap. Gatekeeper may say the developer cannot be verified.

Move Clipth to /Applications, then either right-click the app and choose Open, or clear the download quarantine flag:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Clipth.app

You can also build from source below.

System Requirements

• macOS 14.0 Sonoma or later
• Xcode 16.0 or later recommended for development

Build from Source

Open Clipth.xcodeproj in Xcode, select "My Mac", and run.

Command line:

xcodebuild \
  -project Clipth.xcodeproj \
  -scheme Clipth \
  -configuration Debug \
  -destination 'platform=macOS' \
  -derivedDataPath build \
  -skipMacroValidation \
  CODE_SIGN_IDENTITY="-" \
  CODE_SIGNING_REQUIRED=NO \
  CODE_SIGNING_ALLOWED=NO \
  build

Release signing for maintainers is documented in CONTRIBUTING.md.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Shortcut	Action
⌘⇧V	Open main window
⌘,	Open settings
⌘N	New snippet
⌘⏎	Save in snippet editor
Esc	Dismiss preview, go back, or cancel edit

Project Docs

• Privacy
• Security policy
• Contributing
• Roadmap
• Code of Conduct

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome. Good first areas include documentation, localization, MCP resources/prompts, URL sanitizer tests, search parser tests, and privacy polish.

Before contributing, read CONTRIBUTING.md. For private security or privacy reports, follow SECURITY.md.

License

Clipth is released under the MIT License.

This repository is the open-source edition; Clipth Pro is a separate commercial product, and Pro-only features are not included here.