Overview

PasteDaemon Help

PasteDaemon keeps every copy you make, and lets you reshape what you copied without leaving the keyboard. This is the whole of what it does, one page per part.

PasteDaemon is a menu bar app. It has no Dock icon and no window of its own: it sits behind whatever you are working in, keeps what you copy, and comes out when you press for it.

New here? The quick start is the first ten minutes, done in order: install it, learn the one chord, turn on the two settings worth turning on, and run something. Or take the tutorial — Tutorial in the menu bar, and the last thing a first launch offers — which walks six of those steps in the app itself, waiting on each until you have done it. This page is the map of everything else.

The three ways something happens

Almost everything in PasteDaemon is one of these, and each has its own page.

You do this	And this fires	Set up in
Copy something	A trigger — text that looks like JSON gets pretty printed, a copy from your password manager is dropped	Triggers
Press a chord	A shortcut — the overlay, or one action run on whatever is on the clipboard	General Settings
Type a few characters	An abbreviation — `!email` becomes your address, wherever you are typing	Abbreviations

The thing all three run is an action: a named transformation of text. About fifty of them ship with the app, and you can write your own. Actions are also what the overlay's search bar speaks, where they chain together into a pipeline:

$1 | trim | upper
$2 | split , >> @recipients
$1 ++ " — " ++ $(| strftime %F)

Where things are

Quick start — the first ten minutes, in order, if you have just installed it.
General Settings — launching at login, the overlay's chord, automatic pasting, how long things are kept, excluded apps, rebinding keys, the sounds it makes, importing a history from another app, and taking your rules to another Mac.
Copying — what gets kept and what does not: text, formatting, files, images, where a copy came from, pausing, and retention.
Overlay — the panel: searching, the keys, pins, filtering by kind, looking at something in full, past values, dragging a row out.
Pipelines — the search bar as a small shell: references, filters, arithmetic, lists, redirects, commands inside commands.
Variables — named entries, snippets, lists, and secrets kept in the Secure Enclave.
Actions — writing your own, the kinds there are, folders, and the standard library reference.
Triggers — running actions automatically on a copy.
Abbreviations — expanding text as you type it.
API server — letting other programs on this Mac read and change what the app holds, over HTTP.
Agents (MCP server) — the same thing said in the Model Context Protocol, so an assistant can find what you copied.

The keys worth knowing first

Every one of these can be rebound in Preferences → Shortcuts, except the ones that walk the list.

Key	What it does
`⌘⌥C`	Show the overlay
`⌘1`–`⌘9`, `↩`	Use that row: paste it, or run that action
`↑` `↓`	Move the highlight
`⇥`	Start a command from the highlighted row, or complete one
`⌘L`	Look at the highlighted row in full
`⌘P`	Pin it, so time never drops it
`⌘⌫`	Delete it
`⌘F`	Show only one kind of thing
`⌃↩`	What that entry used to hold
`⇧↩`	Store it in a variable
`⌘↩`	Gather rows into a list
`⌥↩`	Write that row's reference into the search bar
`⌘T`	Pause or resume recording
`⌘,`	Preferences
`⎋`	Close the overlay and hand the keyboard back

What it does not do

It does not send anything anywhere. The history stays on this Mac, in ~/Library/Application Support/PasteDaemon. The only network the app uses at all is the once-a-day update check, which you can switch off.
It ignores what it should. Copies marked as concealed — the convention password managers use — are never recorded, and neither is anything copied while an excluded app is in front.
Nothing is a subscription to anything. These help pages are the ones that shipped inside your copy of the app; they are also on the web at pastedaemon.app/docs.