1. Install & launch
ReCopied lives in your menu bar. On first launch you'll see the ReCopied icon appear near the clock. That's your home base. Click it to open the clipboard popover; click it again to dismiss.
2. Grant paste permission (optional)
To let ReCopied paste directly into other apps, macOS needs Accessibility permission. The first time you use a Paste action, ReCopied offers to open System Settings › Privacy & Security › Accessibility. The same permission lets Auto Queue paste with plain ⌘V. Everything else works without any permission.
3. Clipboard history
Copy anything, text, rich text, links, images, files, even colors, and it appears at the top of your history. Click a clipping to select it, press ⌘C to copy it back, or press Space to preview.
- Search by just typing: the list's title bar turns into the search field. It matches titles, text, URLs, and link page titles, and you can search by type too: try color, json, image, link, or secret. Press Esc once to clear, again to close.
- Delete with the Delete key. An Undo button appears for a few seconds in case you change your mind.
- Pause capture when you don't want history recorded, from the menu or from any app with ⌃⌘P; in-app actions still work.
- Smart clippings: colors get a swatch, JSON pretty-prints, timestamps show a date (step 6).
4. Clip Lists & Clip Queue
Clip Lists keep related clippings together and never trim. Click the list name at the top of ReCopied to open the list switcher: Clipboard History and the Clip Queue sit at the top, your own lists below. Jump straight to any of the first nine with ⌘1 to ⌘9, or press ⌘L to open the switcher. Use + in the switcher to create a list, and add clippings from their right-click menu or by dragging.
Don't need a list right now? Park it: turn off Active in Manage Clip Lists and it hides from the switcher and Add to List (its clippings are kept), and any rules that route to it pause until you switch it back on.
The Clip Queue lines up clippings and pastes them in order, one per shortcut. Add items from a clipping's right-click menu (Add to Clip Queue) or by dropping them in, then drag to reorder. Add several at once and they go in the order you copied them, after anything already queued. Press Copy Next (⌃⌘C) to put the next item on the clipboard so you can paste it yourself, or turn on Paste Next (⌃⌘V) to paste it straight into the app you are using. Great for filling a form field by field, or dropping a list of values into code.
Auto Queue skips the adding step. Turn it on with the switch at the top of the Clip Queue, from the menu, or from any app with ⌃⌘S, and everything you copy lines up in the queue, in order. Then press plain ⌘V to paste each item, one key per item. The menu bar icon changes while it's on, so you always know. When the last item is pasted, the Clip Queue shows how many went out.
- ⌘V goes back to normal as soon as the queue is empty or Auto Queue is off. It also pastes normally when nothing editable is focused, and inside ReCopied itself.
- Needs Accessibility to paste with ⌘V (the same permission as Paste Next). Without it, Auto Queue still collects; press ⌃⌘C to load the next item, then ⌘V. An orange ⓘ next to the switch explains both ways and opens System Settings.
- Off at every launch, so ⌘V never surprises you. Pausing turns Auto Queue off, and turning Auto Queue on resumes capture.
Pasted into the wrong field? Press Step Back (⌃⌘Z), or click the dashed Step Back row at the top of the Clip Queue, and the last item goes back to the front of the queue, ready to paste again where it belongs. Press it again to go further back. The row names the item it will restore. Step Back remembers up to 50 items from the current batch, until ReCopied quits. Clearing the queue, or starting a new batch once it's empty, resets it.
5. Formatters, merge & split
Formatters transform a clipping as you copy it: right-click and choose
Copy with Formatter to wrap it as Markdown, a quote, a code block, and more, using tokens like
{text}, {title}, {url}. Beyond Markdown, the built-in library includes case
styles (snake, camel, kebab), base64, hex, and URL encode and decode, JSON formatting, URL or email extraction, and
ready-made AI prompts for the assistant you already use. Add the ones you want from
Settings › Formatters › More Formatters….
Merge combines several selected clippings into one: select them and choose Merge, preview the result (optionally through a formatter), then add it.
Split does the reverse. Right-click a text clipping and choose Split into Clippings… (⇧⌘M in the window) to turn it into one clipping per line, or split on tabs, commas, or your own separator. Preview the pieces, then add them to the current list or send them straight to the Clip Queue to paste in order.
- Comma reads CSV. Quoted values stay together, so
"Smith, John"is one piece, even if the quotes span more than one line. A doubled quote ("") inside quotes is a literal quote. - Empty cells keep their place when you split on tabs, commas, or a custom separator, so
Ada,,Londonis three pieces with an empty one in the middle. Pasting an empty piece leaves that field blank, and every value after it still lands in the right field. - Blank lines are dropped, and every piece is trimmed of surrounding spaces.
See the Formatters reference for the full list of tokens and modifiers.
6. Smart clippings & tools
ReCopied recognizes common content and adds the right preview and actions automatically:
- Colors (
#3B82F6,rgb(…),hsl(…), CSS names) show a swatch; convert with Copy with Formatter › Convert Color → HEX / RGB / HSL. - JSON is recognized and can be copied Pretty or Minified (Convert JSON), with the before and after shown side by side in the detail pane.
- Unix timestamps show a human date, with Convert Date → ISO 8601 / Local Date.
- Secrets and payment cards are masked in previews (step 9).
Two tools live in the detail pane: QR Code, which generates a QR from any clipping to copy or save, and Copy Text from Image, on-device recognition (OCR) that pulls text out of a copied screenshot.
7. Capture rules
Rules run the moment something is copied. Each one matches on the source app, a text pattern (plain text or a regular expression), or the type of content: images, links, files, colors, JSON, timestamps, secrets, or payment cards. It then either routes the copy into a Clip List or the Clip Queue, or ignores it entirely.
The fastest way to make one: right-click any clipping and choose Create Rule for ‹App›. ReCopied files that clipping right away and shows you the new rule in Settings. Build and edit rules in Settings › Rules. Every rule has an on/off switch, so you can park one and re-arm it later instead of deleting it.
Tip: a Secret → Ignore type rule keeps API keys and tokens out of your history entirely, even when they're copied from an editor or terminal.
8. Paste & plain text
Paste into the active app is optional and off by default. When you turn it on, ReCopied asks for Accessibility permission so it can paste a clipping straight into the app you were just using. You never need it: you can always copy with ⌘C and paste with ⌘V yourself. Plain Text Mode strips formatting so pasted text matches its destination. Toggle it from the menu or with a hotkey (⌃⇧T by default).
9. Privacy & sensitive data
Your clipboard history never leaves your Mac. There's no account to create and no analytics, and ReCopied is 100% local by default: nothing syncs unless you turn on iCloud sync (step 10), and even then your history stays on this Mac.
ReCopied automatically skips anything password managers flag as sensitive, so passwords and one-time codes never enter your history. As an extra guard, anything that looks like a payment card or API key is masked in previews, with the real value kept for when you actually need it. For the strictest setup, add a Secret → Ignore rule (step 7).
10. iCloud Sync
Want your snippets on more than one Mac? Turn on sync in Settings › Sync, and your Clip Lists, Formatters, and Rules follow you through your own iCloud, never through servers we run.
Sync is off until you turn it on, and staying off is fully supported. Your clipboard history and the Clip Queue always stay on the Mac they were copied on. After turning sync on or off, relaunch ReCopied so it takes effect.