First ten minutes

Quick start

The first ten minutes. Install it, learn the one chord, turn on the two settings worth turning on, and run something — each step is a thing you will go on doing every day.

Nine steps, none of them long. By the end you will have used the history, searched it, run a filter over a copy, kept a snippet under a name and expanded one as you typed — which is most of what the app is for.

1. Install it

Unzip the download, drag PasteDaemon into your Applications folder, and open it.

It has no Dock icon and no window: what appears is the clipboard icon in the menu bar, at the top right of the screen. That icon's menu is the app's front door — everything below can also be reached from it.

The first launch does three things before handing you back: it explains the one permission the app asks for and offers to open the pane that grants it, it offers to bring a history over from another clipboard manager, and then it offers you the tutorial — six things drawn from the steps below, done rather than read, with a small card at the top of the screen that waits for each one. Taking it is the fastest way through this page; declining opens nothing, and Tutorial in the menu bar makes the offer again whenever you want it.

If you already use another clipboard manager, that offer to bring its history over is the second of those. Alfred, Maccy, CopyQ and Flycut are read directly, and Add a File… takes an export from anything else. Nothing of the other app's is written to, and you can do it later from Preferences → General → Import….

2. Copy some things, then press ⌘⌥C

Copy three or four things — a line of text, a URL, a screenshot, a couple of files in Finder. Then press ⌘⌥C.

That is the overlay: everything you have copied, newest first.

Using a row puts it back on the clipboard, ready to paste. ⎋ leaves the desktop exactly as it found it, so you can open the panel, look, and change nothing.

3. Turn on the two settings worth turning on

Press ⌘, for Preferences, and in General:

• Launch PasteDaemon at login. A clipboard history keeps nothing while it is not running. It is off until you ask for it, and nothing turns it on for you.
• Automatically paste selection. With it on, using a row pastes it straight back into the app you were in, rather than only putting it on the clipboard. macOS only allows that for apps approved under Privacy & Security → Accessibility; the first launch offers to open that pane, and so does this one if you have not granted it yet.

Everything else works without that permission. It is the same one abbreviations need, so it is worth granting now if you plan to reach step 8.

While you are in there, the overlay shortcut is on the same pane if ⌘⌥C clashes with something you already use.

4. Find something

Open the overlay again and type. Two kinds of matching happen at once, and the difference is worth knowing on day one:

• What you copied is matched by whole words, in the order you type them, so brew fzf finds the command that used both and nothing else.
• Names — an action's keyword, a variable's name — are matched the way a command palette does, so b64 finds base64 and sfl finds Strip Files List.

A screenshot is searched by the words in it: every image is read on its way into the history, so typing an invoice number finds the picture of the invoice.

⌘F narrows the list to one kind of thing — Text, Links, Images, File lists, Variables — and each choice says how many rows it would leave.

5. Watch a trigger fire

Copy something that is valid JSON, all on one line.

It comes back pretty printed, indented by two spaces with the keys in the order they were written, and the HUD says JSON copied at the bottom of the screen. That is a trigger: a condition, and the actions to run when it holds. It ships armed; two more — Jira ticket copied, Remove Tracking Parameters From URL — ship switched off, to show the shape without rewriting anybody's clipboard uninvited.

Nothing was lost. The text as you copied it is still in that entry, behind the new value: press ⌃↩ on the row to see both, or run $1 | undo to bring the original back.

6. Run a filter by hand

In the overlay, highlight a row with some untidy text on it and press ⇥. The search bar becomes:

$2 | 

Now type a filter name — the rows underneath offer them as you type — and watch the preview change above the bar:

$2 | trim | upper

↩ runs it. The result goes on the clipboard and to the top of the history.

That is a pipeline, and it is the same language everywhere else in the app. $1 is the newest copy, $2 the one before it. About fifty filters ship: trim, json, base64, slug, strftime, split, count, upside-down — the standard library reference lists every one, and resting the highlight on any of them for a second shows its help under the list.

7. Keep a snippet under a name

Highlight a row worth keeping — your address, a signature, a licence key — and press ⇧↩. The bar fills in with the command that stores it:

$2 > $

Type a name, say sig, and press ↩.

$sig is now a variable: it never expires, it is never pruned, and typing sig in the overlay finds it and pastes it like anything else. This is how the app doubles as a snippet keeper. For something that must not be readable on disk, the Variables pane makes a secret instead — sealed by the Secure Enclave, and unsearchable.

8. Expand something as you type it

Preferences → Abbreviations → +. Set what is typed to !email, leave the kind as Text, and put your address in the expansion.

Now type !email in any app. The characters come back out and your address is typed in their place — nothing goes on the clipboard, so what you had copied is still there.

This needs the Accessibility permission from step 3. Until there is at least one abbreviation defined, the app watches no keystrokes at all.

9. Pin the thing you keep reaching for

Highlight it and press ⌘P.

The history is a conveyor that runs on time: text is kept for three months and images for a week unless you say otherwise. A pin steps off that belt — it never expires, survives Clear History, and sits at the top of the list with nothing typed. Six of them at most, which is a shelf rather than a library; the library is what step 7 made.

Where to go next

• Overlay — the rest of the keys: dragging a row into another window, reading one in full, walking an entry's past values.
• Pipelines — arithmetic, lists dealt out one paste at a time, commands inside commands, sending a result to a variable.
• Actions — writing your own, as a regex, a script or a chain.
• Triggers — including the one worth having early: a forget rule that drops anything shaped like a token the instant it is copied.
• General Settings — retention, excluded apps, rebinding every chord, and taking your rules to another Mac.