ClipMenu 2 is a clipboard-history manager for macOS, rewritten in Swift 6. It runs as a menu-bar agent with no Dock icon: press ⌘⇧V to pop the menu at the cursor, pick a clip, and it is pasted into the app you were working in. Snippets, JavaScript text actions, and folder-based backup of your settings come with it.
- Screenshots
- Requirements
- Install
- Features
- Actions and snippets
- Troubleshooting
- Building from source
- Tests
- Contributing
- Credits
- License
- macOS 26 (Tahoe) or later.
- Apple Silicon — the app ships a single arm64 build.
brew install --cask teddychan/tap/clipmenu-2Upgrade later with brew upgrade --cask clipmenu-2.
ClipMenu 2 is also on the Mac App Store, free. That build is sandboxed and updates through the App Store instead of Sparkle. Because the sandbox forbids pasting into other apps, it copies the clip you pick and you press ⌘V yourself; everything else matches the direct download.
Download ClipMenu-2-vX.Y.Z.zip from the
latest release, unzip it,
and move ClipMenu 2.app into /Applications. These builds are Developer
ID-signed and notarized, and update themselves via Sparkle.
Quit ClipMenu 2 first. The Settings window has an Uninstall pane that removes the app, its login item, preferences, caches, and support files for you, with an optional toggle for your clipboard history and snippets.
To do it by hand, quit the app, then:
brew uninstall --zap --cask clipmenu-2 # if you installed with Homebrew
rm -rf ~/Library/Preferences/com.dragonapp.clipmenu-2.plist \
~/Library/Caches/com.dragonapp.clipmenu-2 \
~/Library/HTTPStorages/com.dragonapp.clipmenu-2 \
"$HOME/Library/Application Support/ClipMenu"Application Support/ClipMenu holds the clipboard-history and snippet stores,
actions.plist, and your own action scripts — delete it only if you want that data
gone. The App Store build is sandboxed, so its files live in
~/Library/Containers/com.dragonapp.clipmenu-2 instead.
Note
ClipMenu 2 is a modern Swift 6 rebuild based on the original ClipMenu by Naotaka Morimoto, used under the MIT License.
- Clipboard history at the cursor — ⌘⇧V pops the main menu where your pointer is, ⌃⌘V the history-only menu, ⌘⇧B the snippets menu; all three are rebindable in Settings ▸ Shortcuts.
- Search as you type — the history menu (⌃⌘V) opens with a focused search field and filters clips on every keystroke.
- Seven clipboard types — plain text, RTF, RTFD, PDF, filenames, URLs, and TIFF images, each individually switchable in Settings ▸ Type.
- Menu you can shape — inline versus folded item counts, item numbering with numeric key equivalents, type labels, tooltips, font size, and image thumbnails.
- Text snippets in folders — stored separately from history and shown above, below, or grouped under the clipboard list.
- JavaScript actions — transform a clip in place with bundled or your own scripts; see Actions and snippets.
- Excluded apps — name applications whose clipboard contents ClipMenu 2 should never record.
- Folder-based backup and sync — point Settings ▸ Sync & Backup at a folder to back up snippets and settings; put that folder in Dropbox, iCloud Drive, or Google Drive to carry them between Macs. No account, no CloudKit.
- Seven languages — English, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and French, switchable without restarting.
- Launch at login and a status-bar item you can hide.
Actions are text transforms that run on the item you clicked. Control-click or right-click a clip or snippet in the menu to pop the Actions menu; the result is copied and pasted for you. Settings ▸ Action decides which modifier does what — Shift-, Option-, and Command-click do nothing by default — and can invoke a lone action immediately instead of showing a menu.
Bundled actions live in App/Sources/ClipMenu/Resources/script/action:
| Group | What it does |
|---|---|
| Case | UPPERCASE, lowercase, Capitalize, Title Case |
| Trim | Trim, LTrim, RTrim, and Collapse Spaces |
| HTML | escape and unescape entities, strip tags, encode and decode URI components, character↔decimal, Markdown to HTML, surround with a tag you type |
| Crypt | Base64 encode and decode, MD5, SHA-1 |
| Japanese | hiragana↔katakana, and zenkaku↔hankaku for alphanumerics and katakana |
| Surround with | wrap the text in quotes, brackets, or braces — an ASCII set and a Japanese set (「」, 【】, （）, and the rest) |
| Reverse | reverse the characters |
Three built-in actions are not scripts: Paste as Plain Text, Paste as File Path, and Remove (delete the clip from history).
Scripts run in JavaScriptCore with the clip's text bound to clipText; a script
returns the replacement string, can ClipMenu.require() a bundled library, and can
prompt() you for input. Add your own by dropping .js files into
~/Library/Application Support/ClipMenu/script/action/ — that tree is searched before
the bundled one, so a same-named file overrides a built-in. Settings ▸ Action lists
Built-in, Script, and User Script actions so you can pick which appear in the menu.
Snippets are reusable text you keep in folders. Open Edit Snippets… from the menu
to add, rename, reorder, and delete them, or to import and export the whole set as
XML; each folder becomes a submenu, ordered as you arranged it. Settings ▸ Menu
controls where snippets sit relative to the clipboard history and whether every folder
is grouped under a single Snippets item. On first launch, a legacy Snippets.xml
in ~/Library/Application Support/ClipMenu/ is imported if your snippet store is
still empty.
Pasting into the frontmost app needs Accessibility permission. Grant ClipMenu 2 under System Settings ▸ Privacy & Security ▸ Accessibility. The Mac App Store build cannot use Accessibility at all — its sandbox forbids it — so there the clip is copied and you press ⌘V.
That is expected of a locally built app that is ad-hoc signed: macOS treats each build
as a new application. Create a stable self-signed "ClipMenu Dev" code-signing
certificate (Keychain Access ▸ Certificate Assistant) and scripts/run.sh will sign
with it, so the grant survives rebuilds.
You need macOS 26 or later on Apple Silicon and a Swift 6 toolchain (Xcode 26+ or the matching Command Line Tools).
cd app
swift build
./scripts/run.sh # assembles a .app bundle and launches itUse scripts/run.sh rather than swift run: it builds, assembles
.build/ClipMenu 2.app (an LSUIElement agent), code-signs it, and launches it. The
status-bar item and agent behavior only work from inside a .app bundle — swift run
launches a bare executable.
App/— the Swift app:Sources/,Tests/, bundledResources/, andscripts/, alongside the bundle inputsInfo.plist,AppIcon.icnsandClipMenu.entitlements(DragonKit CONFORMANCE §R16 places those, in every Dragon app).
Releases are automated in GitHub Actions. Pushing a vX.Y.Z tag builds, signs
(Developer ID), notarizes, and publishes the GitHub Release, the Sparkle appcast, and
the Homebrew cask.
The Mac App Store package is a second distribution channel for that same release, not a
second version series: run Release (Mac App Store) from the Actions tab and give it the
existing vX.Y.Z tag. It refuses anything that is not an exact public tag. See
.github/workflows/release.yml and
.github/workflows/release-mas.yml.
The suite lives in App/Tests/ClipMenuTests and runs on Swift Testing, no simulator
or granted permissions required. It covers clipboard capture and privacy filtering, the
history and snippet stores with their migrations, JavaScript and built-in actions, menu
building and search, hotkey rebinding, the Settings panes, and folder backup and
restore. CI runs the whole suite on every pull request via
.github/workflows/tests.yml, using the same script.
App/scripts/test.shUse the script rather than a bare swift test: it runs the suite serially
(--no-parallel), which several suites require because they share process-global
state such as NSPasteboard.general.
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Test cases | 374 passing |
| Line coverage | 74.2% of Sources/ClipMenu |
| Measured on | v2.18.1 (154fc6e), Swift 6.3.3 |
Bug reports and feature requests are welcome on the
issues page. For pull requests, keep
changes focused, run App/scripts/test.sh before you push, and record notable
changes in CHANGELOG.md (developer-facing notes; the user-facing
release notes live in App/Sources/ClipMenu/WhatsNewConfig.swift).
Based on the original ClipMenu by Naotaka Morimoto, used under the MIT License.
My first clipboard manager was CLCL:
MIT — see LICENSE.