At a glance
- Open: hold ⌥⌘V and the popup appears the instant the keys go down.
- Pick: while still holding, tap V or use the up and down arrows.
- Paste: release, and the highlighted item lands. The popup closes on its own.
- Browse instead: ⌥⌘P pins the popup so you can search, scroll and switch tabs.
- Works everywhere: the paste goes through the standard system paste, so every app behaves the same.
How the gesture works
The chips in the preview change with what you copied. A hex value offers colour conversions, a JSON blob offers pretty-print and minify, AI output offers the cleanup that strips em dashes, curly quotes and invisible characters. Detection runs first, across 22 content types, so the panel is never a wall of buttons that do not apply.
Whatever you pick applies to the paste itself, offline, in the app you are already in. No browser tab in the middle.
Holding keeps it open. The popup stays up as long as ⌥⌘V is down, newest copy at the top, older ones below. Nothing has been pasted yet at this point.
Tapping V walks the list. One tap, one step down. The arrows do the same, and the row you are on is the row that pastes.
Release commits. Let go and the item goes into your document, chat box or editor. Because the paste fires on key release, the popup is gone by the time the text appears. Release without choosing anything and nothing pastes, which matters more than it sounds: an accidental chord costs you nothing.
When you want to browse instead
Press ⌥⌘P while the popup is open and it stays put. Pinned, you can type to search the whole history, scroll, and move between History, Favorites, Snippets and Stack with ⌘← and ⌘→. Click or press Return to paste. The shortcut pins an open popup and closes a pinned one, so it will not summon the popup from nothing.
Hold when you know roughly where the item is. Pin when you have to hunt for it. Searching covers text you copied and text found inside copied images, so a screenshot is findable by the words in it. The Stack is the other direction: collect several items and paste them in order, one shortcut each.
The built-in option, on Tahoe and before
macOS 26 Tahoe has a clipboard history inside Spotlight. Press ⌘Space, then ⌘4, highlight an item, press Enter. It is built mainly for text, it holds copies for 8 hours by default and 7 days at the maximum, and it lives inside Spotlight rather than in its own surface. On macOS 15 Sequoia and earlier there is no built-in clipboard history at all.
If you are on Tahoe and only paste short text you copied minutes ago, that covers you and it is free. Klipto is for the copy you made yesterday, the screenshot you need the words out of, and the paste that should arrive reformatted. It keeps a permanent local history, handles rich text, images, links, colours and files, and pastes on key release rather than on a separate Enter.
Everything runs on the Mac. The clipboard never leaves the machine, and the app touches the network only to check for updates.