Copas

A clipboard manager for macOS. Everything you copy, kept, searchable, and one keystroke away.

Copas lives in the menu bar. Press ⇧⌘V and a panel opens with everything you have copied listed down the left, newest first, grouped by day — and the whole of whichever one you are on beside it. Arrow to a clip or click it, press Return, and it pastes into whatever you were just typing in.

⇧⌘2 drags out a region of the screen and puts the text in it on your clipboard — a receipt, an error dialog, a screenshot somebody sent you.

What it does

• Text and images, with formatting preserved. Copy something bold out of a document and it pastes back bold.
• Search that reaches the whole clip, not just the first line — including text recognised inside pictures. Type anywhere on the board to start.
• Reads text in images automatically, on this Mac, as they arrive. A screenshot of a receipt is findable by what the receipt says.
• Skips what it should. Anything a password manager marks as concealed is never read, never hashed, and never written to disk. You can exclude other apps by hand.

Keyboard

⇧⌘V	Show the board
⇧⌘2	Capture a region of the screen as text
Type anything	Search
↑ ↓	Move between clips
⌥↑ ⌥↓	Jump a day at a time
⇞ ⇟	Move a screenful at a time
Home End	First and last clip
↩	Paste into the app you came from
⌘↩	Copy without pasting
⌘1–⌘9	Paste the nth clip
⌘Y	Expand the clip over the board
⌘⌫	Delete the focused clip
⎋	Close the expanded clip, then the search, then the board

Search

Free text matches the clip, the text recognised in an image, and the app it came from. Filters narrow it:

app:xcode              copied from Xcode
type:image             pictures only
type:text              text only
has:text invoice       pictures with recognised text mentioning "invoice"

Anything else with a colon in it — a URL, a key: value line you copied — is searched for literally rather than treated as a filter.

Privacy

Everything stays on your Mac. There is no account, no sync, and no analytics. Text recognition runs locally through Vision. The only network request Copas ever makes is to its own update feed.

Clips live in ~/Library/Application Support/Copas/, unencrypted, readable by anything running as you — the same as any clipboard manager. If that matters for what you copy, exclude the app it comes from in Settings → History.

Installing

Download the latest .dmg from Releases and drag Copas to Applications. Builds are signed and notarised by Apple.

Copas asks for two permissions, and only when it first needs them:

• Accessibility, to press ⌘V for you. Without it the clip still lands on the clipboard and ⌘V by hand works.
• Screen Recording, for capture to text. Only when you first press ⇧⌘2.

Requires macOS 14 or later. Universal — Apple silicon and Intel.

Building

brew install xcodegen
xcodegen generate
open Copas.xcodeproj

project.yml is the source of truth; Copas.xcodeproj is generated and not checked in. See CONTRIBUTING.md.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md for the layout, the test suite, and what's deliberate about the style. Found a security issue? See SECURITY.md instead of opening a public issue.

This project follows a Code of Conduct.

Licence

MIT — see LICENSE. Copas embeds Sparkle and GRDB, both MIT licensed.