KeepitEverything you copy, one ⌥M away.
Keepit is a free, open-source clipboard manager for Mac. It keeps a history of everything you copy and pastes any of it back where you are typing. Templates for the text you type every day. Encrypted on disk, unlocked with Touch ID, never leaves your Mac.
Free and open source (MIT) · macOS 13 or later, Apple silicon and Intel · Notarized by Apple · All releases
⌃⌥5Clipboard history, three keys you'll learn in a minute
Keepit lives in the menu bar and stays out of the way. Every key below works in any app, and every one of them can be changed.
The history menu
Opens next to your text cursor. Type to search, hit a number or click — the item is pasted where you were typing. Hold ⇧ and every item grows a submenu: plain text, UPPERCASE, add to templates, delete.
Paste without the menu
⌃⌥1…⌃⌥0 paste items 1–10 straight away; ⌥⇧V pastes the one before the current. ⌃⌥V pastes as plain text, ⌃⌥U as UPPERCASE, ⌃⌥T as Title Case.
Templates
Signatures, addresses, replies you send ten times a day — in folders, with their own hot keys. Placeholders ask for a name, insert today's date or the clipboard, and leave the cursor where you want it.
Templates that fill themselves in — a snippet manager built in
A template is plain text with placeholders. When you paste it, Keepit asks for the inputs, expands the rest and puts the cursor where {cursor} was.
Text, images, files
Rich text with formatting, screenshots with thumbnails, lists of files from Finder. Duplicates are merged into one entry.
The Viewer
Search everything at once, edit items in place, drag history into templates, inspect any item — even as a hex dump.
Works with Shortcuts, Raycast and Alfred
A keepit:// URL scheme pastes item N or a template by name, adds text to history or templates, pauses recording. No scripting dictionary to learn.
Copy five things, paste five things
Press ⌥N, copy as many items as you need — the menu bar counts them — then ⌥V pastes them back one at a time in the same order. ⌘V keeps working as usual.
Menu bar only
No Dock icon, no windows until you ask for one. Launches at login, uses a few megabytes, polls the clipboard every 0.3 s like every clipboard manager has to.
Per-app paste keys
Some apps want ⌘⇧V or ⌃V to paste. Tell Keepit once, per app, and it uses the right key there.
Updates itself
Signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple. Checks GitHub Releases once a day and installs the update in one click; every update is signature-checked before it runs.
Private by design, not by promise
A clipboard manager sees passwords, addresses and half-written messages. Keepit is built so that none of it can go anywhere.
- Turn on a password and history and templates are stored with AES-256-GCM; the key is derived with PBKDF2 (200 000 rounds) and wiped from memory whenever Keepit locks.
- Unlock with Touch ID. The password stays as a fallback, and a 24-word recovery phrase, shown once, opens your data if you forget it.
- Copies from 1Password, Bitwarden, KeePassXC, Apple Passwords and anything marked concealed by the copying app are never recorded.
- Locks on demand, when the screen locks or when the Mac sleeps. Source is open, builds are reproducible from a tagged commit, and the signing keys live in a protected release environment. Read the security page
Install it your way
Same app, same features in every edition. Move between them any time with an encrypted backup file.
Homebrew
From the project's own tap. brew upgrade keeps it current alongside everything else.
brew tap andrey-insarov/keepit https://github.com/andrey-insarov/Keepit && brew install --cask andrey-insarov/keepit/keepitMac App Store
Sandboxed edition with the same features, no update check at all. Keepit is in review; this page will link to it as soon as it is live.
Coming soonEvery default key
All of them are global and all of them can be changed in Settings → Shortcuts. A key that collides with one you already use stays off until you assign it.
- ⌥M
- History menu at the text cursor
- ⌥T
- Templates menu
- ⌃⌥1–0
- Paste history item 1–10
- ⌥⇧V
- Paste the previous item
- ⌃⌥V
- Paste the clipboard as plain text
- ⌃⌥U L T S
- Paste as UPPERCASE, lowercase, Title Case, Sentence case
- ⌃⌥W J
- Paste trimmed, paste on one line
- ⌥N ⌥V ⌥⇧N
- Paste queue: start/stop, paste next, paste all remaining
- ⌃⌥A
- Add the clipboard to templates
- ⌃⌥⌫
- Delete the latest item
- ⌥E
- Open the Viewer
- ⌥S
- Settings
- ⌥P
- Pause recording
- ⌥L
- Lock now
- ⌥C ⌥Q
- Clear history, quit
Inside the history menu: type to search, 1–0 to pick, hold ⇧ for the per-item submenu, ⌘+number to paste as plain text.
Questions
Why does Keepit ask for the Accessibility permission?
For two things: to send ⌘V to the app you were working in after you pick an item, and to find the text cursor so the menu opens next to it. Keepit does not read or monitor other apps. Without the permission it still records history and copies the chosen item to the clipboard — you paste by hand.
Does anything leave my Mac?
No. The only network request is the daily update check against GitHub Releases, and the App Store edition does not make even that one. There is no account, no telemetry, no crash reporting.
What if I forget the password?
Use the 24-word recovery phrase Keepit showed you when you turned protection on, or Touch ID on the same Mac. With neither, the data cannot be recovered — there is no master key, by design.
Is it really free? What's the catch?
Free, MIT-licensed, source on GitHub. Keepit was built by the founder of the it.com domain zone to show what can live at a .it.com address — the app is the advertisement. No ads, no in-app purchases, no pro tier, and therefore nothing to gain from your data.
Where does the design come from?
Keepit is a native macOS take on CLCL, the classic Windows clipboard tool by Ohno Tomoaki, written from scratch in Swift. It is not affiliated with the original author.
How do I move my data to another Mac, or between editions?
Settings → Security → Backup → Export… writes one .keepit file with history, templates and, if you like, preferences, encrypted with a password you choose. On the other Mac, Import… and pick Merge or Replace. The file is AES-256-GCM encrypted, so a USB stick or iCloud Drive is fine.
Which Macs are supported?
macOS 13 Ventura or later, Apple silicon and Intel. Touch ID unlock needs a Mac with Touch ID.
Made by the team behind it.com
Keepit is a free project from the people who run the it.com domain zone, the home for IT people, products and companies online. Keepit lives at keep.it.com. Your project could live at a name like it too.