Maccy not working on Mac: what to check

The clipboard history will not open. Or it opens, an item gets selected, and nothing lands in the text field. Or the icon is simply gone from the menu bar. These three read like one problem when described out loud, but they have separate causes and separate fixes, and working through them in the wrong order wastes an afternoon.

There is a usable order: the macOS version first, then where the app came from, then permissions, then the settings that stop recording, then login items. Reinstalling belongs at the end, not the beginning, because a reinstall clears the list of pasteboard types the app was told to ignore.

Start with the system requirement, because nothing below it matters

Maccy requires macOS Sonoma 14 or higher. The download section on maccy.app states it, and the App Store listing shows the same minimum. On Ventura or older, a current build either refuses to launch or quits immediately after launching. That is not a broken install, and no amount of setting changes will move it.

The version on the App Store is 2.7.1, updated on 11 August 2026. If the copy on the machine predates that and the behavior is odd, update before opening any settings pane. A surprising share of reported breakage is a build from two years ago meeting a newer macOS.

Homebrew users have one extra thing to rule out. A cask install and a direct download are the same application, but the update paths differ, and a machine that has had both at different times can end up with two copies in different folders. Only one of them is the one being launched at login. Checking the Applications folder for duplicates takes a moment and explains a class of symptoms that look like settings not being saved: the settings were saved, by the other copy.

Then check where the download came from. The project's README carries a warning that maccyapp.net and maccyapp.com distribute malware dressed up as this app, and that maccy.app is the only official site. If the install came from a link near the top of a search results page rather than from the official site or the Mac App Store, treat the app itself as suspect: delete it and install again from a known source before debugging anything.

Nothing pastes: two places, in this order

The history list appears, an item gets chosen, and the text field stays empty. There are exactly two things to look at.

The first is the Paste automatically setting in Preferences. With it off, choosing an item puts the text on the clipboard but stops there. The paste itself has to be done by hand. Plenty of people read that as a failure when it is the configured behavior.

The second is a macOS permission. Pasting into another application means sending keystrokes to it, which requires Accessibility access. The project's FAQ states both checks together:

Make sure you have "Paste automatically" enabled in Preferences. Make sure "Maccy" is added to System Settings -> Privacy & Security -> Accessibility. Source: github.com/p0deje/Maccy

Open System Settings, go to Privacy & Security, then Accessibility, and look for the entry. If it is listed but switched off, switch it on. If it switches itself off again, remove the entry from the list entirely, relaunch the app, and add it back. Major macOS upgrades are the usual moment for this permission to come loose, because the signature of the binary on disk changed and the stored grant no longer matches it.

One related case is worth separating out. If text pastes but arrives with formatting that does not belong, that is not a permission problem. Selecting an item with ⌥⇧ held pastes without formatting, and the modifier behavior for copy, paste, and paste without formatting is configurable in General settings.

The shortcut does nothing: a conflict, or a key that produces a character

The default shortcut to open the window is ⇧⌘C. When it stops working, the cause is one of two things.

The first is a conflict. If the settings pane reports that the combination is already assigned somewhere in the system, the assignment has to be cleared on the macOS side first. Open System Settings, then Keyboard, then Keyboard Shortcuts, and hunt for the combination. The project's FAQ gives a real example: the shortcut to convert text to simplified Chinese lives under Services, then Text. Disable it there, relaunch the app, and only then assign the shortcut in the app's settings. Doing it in the other order looks like it worked and then quietly does not.

The second case is narrower and easy to misread: the shortcut works everywhere except in password fields. If the chosen combination produces a character, for instance ⌥C producing "ç" on some layouts, macOS treats the keystroke as text input for the secure field and does not hand it to a background app. The fix is to pick a combination that does not produce a character. Remapping at the system level with a key remapping utility is documented by the project, but switching back to something like ⇧⌘C is faster to test.

There is also a behavior that gets reported as a bug. Holding the modifiers and pressing the main key again moves down the list, and releasing the modifiers confirms the selection and closes the window. Releasing early looks like the window closed on its own.

The menu bar icon is gone

Three causes, and only the first one is a setting.

The Appearance section of Preferences has a Show menu icon toggle. Turn it off and the app keeps running with no icon at all. Close the settings window in that state and there is nothing left to click, which reads as unrecoverable. It is not: pressing ⌘, opens preferences directly. The same settings pane carries that reminder for the case where the footer is hidden.

That footer is the second cause. With the footer hidden, the route into preferences from inside the window is gone too. If ⌘, is not available for some reason, one line in Terminal restores it:

defaults write org.p0deje.Maccy showFooter 1

The third cause has nothing to do with the app. Menu bar space is finite, set by the screen width and, on recent laptops, by the notch. As resident apps accumulate, items stop being drawn from the right. An icon that was never hidden can still be invisible. Quitting a couple of other resident apps and watching whether it reappears settles that question in about ten seconds.

New copies are not being recorded

An empty or stale history is usually a mechanism working as designed rather than a fault. Four things to check.

Recording may be switched off. Clicking the menu bar icon with ⌥ held stops new copies from being recorded. Clicking with ⌥⇧ held skips only the next copy. Both are easy to trigger by accident while reaching for a different modifier. The same state can be set from Terminal:

defaults write org.p0deje.Maccy ignoreEvents true

The content type may be on the ignore list. Transient, concealed, and auto generated pasteboard types are always ignored, and the default configuration also ignores types used by several password managers and text expanders. The official site describes this as intended:

Maccy respects your privacy. If your password manager removes a copied password from the clipboard, so will Maccy. Everything is stored on your computer. Source: maccy.app

Copies from another Apple device may be excluded. If the pasteboard type for the shared clipboard between devices was added to the ignore list, those copies will not appear. The feature itself is documented in Apple's support article, and if the sharing is not working at all, that side comes first.

The check interval may be too slow for the workflow. The clipboard is polled every 500 ms by default, so a fast sequence of copies can lose one. The interval is adjustable:

defaults write org.p0deje.Maccy clipboardCheckInterval 0.1

One more case belongs here rather than in the list above. Copies made inside a virtual machine, a remote desktop session, or a screen sharing window often never reach the host clipboard at all, so there is nothing for a clipboard manager to record. That is a property of the session, not of the app, and the test is simple: copy something in the remote window, then paste it directly into a local text field without touching the history. If the paste fails too, the problem sits between the guest and the host.

Items disappearing is a separate matter. Storage settings control whether text, images, and files are kept, and the history size defaults to 200 items. Lower that number and older items fall off the end. Most "the history vanished" reports are the size limit doing its job.

Nothing runs after a restart

Look at Launch at login in General settings. With it off, the app has to be started by hand after every restart, and the position is the same whether the app came from the App Store or from a direct download.

If it is on and the app still does not appear, the block is on the macOS side. System Settings has a list of login items and extensions where background execution can be switched off per app. Reinstalling an app, or upgrading macOS, sometimes leaves that switch off.

Before reinstalling, write three things down

If the six checks above all come back clean, a reinstall is reasonable. Three things do not survive it, and rebuilding them from memory is worse than copying them out first.

The custom pasteboard types on the ignore list are the important one. Defaults come back automatically; anything added by hand does not. For anyone who copies credentials as part of a workflow, losing that list is a real exposure, not an inconvenience.

Pinned items are the second. The addresses and boilerplate pinned to the top of the list are stored data, and a clean install starts empty.

Custom shortcuts are the third. Open, pin, delete, and preview default to ⇧⌘C, ⌥P, ⌥⌫, and ⌃Space, and anything changed from those defaults is worth noting so the muscle memory still matches afterwards.

What to change first

The order, in one table, for anyone who already knows the symptom:

Symptom	First place to look
Will not launch, or quits on launch	macOS version, and where the download came from
List opens, nothing pastes	Paste automatically, and Accessibility access
Shortcut does nothing	Keyboard Shortcuts in System Settings
Shortcut fails only in password fields	Whether the combination produces a character
Icon not visible	Show menu icon, or menu bar space
No new items recorded	Ignore state, ignored types, history size
Absent after a restart	Launch at login, and macOS login items

Work the list top down: system version, install source, Accessibility, shortcut conflicts, the settings that stop recording, login items. Debugging a clipboard manager also means staring at the menu bar long enough to notice how crowded it has become, and crowding is itself the cause of the invisible icon case above. Hiding the icon outright removes the ⌥ click that stops recording and the route into preferences, so the better move is collapsing the bar while keeping every icon clickable, which is what a menu bar manager like Koffret is for. The pricing and FAQ pages cover what that costs and what it does not change.