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. Set a password and it is encrypted on disk and unlocked with Touch ID; either way it stays on your Mac — no account, no Keepit cloud. Backups to a folder of yours are an option, off until you switch it on; the update check can be switched off.
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. Off until you switch it on in Settings → Advanced.
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.
Backed up to your own cloud
Pick a folder — iCloud Drive, Dropbox, a disk — and Keepit keeps complete, encrypted copies there, a new one a few minutes after each change. They open with your Keepit password or recovery phrase on any Mac; the provider sees the ciphertext and a short header, never the content. No Keepit server, ever — and like the password itself, this is an option you can simply leave off.
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. The check is optional — switch it off and Keepit makes no network request at all.
Private by design, not by promise
A clipboard manager sees passwords, addresses and half-written messages. Keepit is built so that none of it goes anywhere you did not choose.
- 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. Type the password on an on-screen keyboard: shuffled keys, no keyboard events for anything to log.
- Anything marked concealed by the copying app is not recorded; copies from 1Password, Bitwarden, KeePassXC, Apple Passwords and other password managers are excluded by app (best effort — how).
- Locks on demand — and, if you choose, after the Mac has been locked or asleep for a delay you set (new installations never lock on their own). 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
- ⌃⌥K D Y X
- Paste struck through, underlined, wavy underlined; remove decorations
- ⌥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?
Not unless you ask it to. Keepit has no server: the only network request is the daily update check against GitHub Releases — and you can switch it off in Settings → General, after which Keepit makes no request at all. The App Store edition does not make even that one. There is no account, no telemetry, no crash reporting. If you switch on automatic backup, encrypted copies are written to a folder you choose; if that folder lives in iCloud Drive or Dropbox, that service syncs them under your account — Keepit itself never talks to it.
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 started as a macOS take on the workflow of CLCL, a classic Windows clipboard tool, and grew into an app of its own — written from scratch in Swift, with ideas drawn from many clipboard and snippet managers. It is not affiliated with the CLCL author.
How do I move my data to another Mac, or between editions?
Switch on Settings → Backup → Back up automatically to a folder and pick iCloud Drive (or any folder): Keepit keeps complete, encrypted .keepit copies there. On the new Mac choose Restore from Backup… at first launch, enter the old Mac's password or recovery phrase, then Replace or Merge. For a one-off file there is Save to Archive… with its own password. Everything is AES-256-GCM encrypted, so a USB stick or a cloud folder is fine, and the same file works in both editions.
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.