MemoryClip

A local-first menu-bar clipboard manager for macOS: keyboard-first history of everything you copy. It also notices your screenshots, reads the text out of them (30 languages, translated into your own when it is not one you read) and turns one into a note in Obsidian, any other folder of Markdown, Apple Notes, or a Shortcut. Copied links arrive with their tracking parameters stripped, API keys and one-time codes are kept encrypted behind the Secure Enclave, and an invitation can become a calendar event, offered for your approval rather than written silently.

No network calls unless you ask for one: no sync, no analytics, no accounts. Clips live in a local SwiftData store, and the models that read, tidy and translate run here too. The only files written anywhere else are the notes you asked for, in the folder you chose, and the calendar events you asked for. One optional setting reaches the network at all: the daily update check below, off until you switch it on.

Requires macOS 26 on Apple silicon.

Screenshots

These are drawn, not recorded: every clip in them comes from motion/fixtures.json, so no real clipboard is ever on show. motion/ renders them and checks that nothing else leaks in.

Install

brew tap yaminerl/memoryclip https://github.com/YamineRL/MemoryClip
brew trust yaminerl/memoryclip
brew install --cask memoryclip

The tap line takes a URL because this repository is the tap (Casks/memoryclip.rb); the trust line is Homebrew 6, which will not load third-party casks until you vouch for them. brew upgrade, brew uninstall and --zap work as usual after that.

By hand: the install page walks through this with screenshots. In short: download the .dmg from Releases and drag it to Applications. The app is ad-hoc signed (no Developer ID, no notarisation), so Gatekeeper blocks the first launch until you strip the quarantine flag, which is all the cask does for you:

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

There is no Dock icon either way. Press ⇧⌘V, or find the clipboard glyph in the menu bar. Launch at login is in Settings → General.

Staying up to date

brew upgrade --cask memoryclip if you installed it that way. If you installed by hand there is nothing to tell you a new version exists (no Dock icon, no window, no sync), so Settings → General → Updates has a switch for it, offered again on its own page of the first-run tour:

• Off by default. With it off, MemoryClip makes no network calls at all.
• On, it asks api.github.com once a day what the newest release is. The request is an unauthenticated GET of a public endpoint carrying no identifier of any kind; the only thing GitHub learns is that some address asked.
• If there is something newer you get one notification: once per version, not once a day until you give in. Take it and MemoryClip downloads that release's .dmg to a temporary folder and opens it, leaving you the same drag onto /Applications as the first install. That window asks you to quit MemoryClip before you drag, because macOS refuses to replace an application while it is running.
• It never installs anything itself. This app is ad-hoc signed, so a silent self-replacing updater would be asking you to trust a binary swap you never saw.

Using it

⇧⌘V opens the panel from any app, newest clip first, list already focused. The menu-bar glyph gives the last five clips under a Recent Clips header, then Open MemoryClip and Pause Capture, then Settings, Permissions and Clear All History, then Quit, the irreversible one kept a separator away from the item people actually come to click.

Key	Does
↑ ↓	Move through the list, or choose a suggestion while one is open (← → move too, while the search field is empty)
⇧+↑ ↓	Extend the selection; ⇧-click and ⌘-click do the same with the mouse
Return	Paste the selected clip, or the whole selection in order; accepts the highlighted suggestion while the list is open
Tab	Accept the highlighted suggestion while the list is open
⇧Return	Paste it as plain text, dropping fonts and colours
⌘1–⌘9	Paste any of the first nine results directly
⌘C	Copy the selected clip, leaving the panel open
⌘S	Save the selected clip as a note, if it carries any text
⌘E	Add the selected clip to the calendar, if it names a date
⌘I	Edit the selected clip in the preview pane
⌘T	Flip the preview between the original and its translation
⌘P	File the selected clip under a pinboard
⌥← ⌥→	Move between All, Pinned and the pinboards
⌃1–⌃9	Jump to the pinboard at that strip position
⌥⇧← ⌥⇧→	Move the selected clip along its pinboard's order
Space	Open the preview pane; press it again on a picture or a file for full-size Quick Look
?	Show the search operator cheat-sheet (a lone ? as the whole query)
Esc	Leave the editor, close the suggestion list, then Quick Look, then the preview, then the panel

Pasting puts the clip on the clipboard, reactivates your previous app and sends a ⌘V. If macOS blocks that synthetic keystroke the clip is still on the clipboard; see Permissions.

Some apps never want the fonts and colours a rich-text clip carries. Settings → General → Pasting keeps a list of them (terminals, editors and the like, seeded with the obvious ones and every entry removable), and a clip pasted into one arrives as plain text without you reaching for ⇧Return.

This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗