Maccy on Mac: how to set it up

The app is installed, the icon is in the menu bar, and copying things now quietly builds a list. That is the whole product working as intended. The part that gets skipped is the ten minutes of decisions that turn it from a list into something usable: which keys do what, what should never be recorded, how much history to keep, and whether the icon stays visible at all.

Setup order matters here for one specific reason. Two of the most wanted behaviours, pasting straight into the front app and using a comfortable hotkey, both depend on something outside the app's own preferences. Left until later, they look like bugs. Done first, they take a minute each. What follows is drawn from the developer's own documentation and source repository.

The download source has a real trap in it

Before anything else, check where the app came from. The project publishes a warning at the top of both its website and its repository: sites impersonating it, naming maccyapp.net and maccyapp.com specifically, distribute malware disguised as the app. The official site is maccy.app and nothing else. Anyone who arrived through a search result and clicked the first download button should verify the domain before continuing.

From the legitimate sources there are three ways in, and they are the same software under the MIT licence.

Source	Cost	Updates
GitHub releases page	Free	Download the new build, or use the built-in update check
Homebrew, brew install maccy	Free	brew upgrade
Mac App Store	$9.99 in the United States, 1,500 yen in Japan	Through the App Store

The paid App Store listing is not a different or better edition. It is the same open source app, sold as a way to support the work, and the project page states plainly that the app is and always will be free. Version 2.7.1 was published to the releases page on 10 August 2026 and reached the App Store on 11 August 2026, so the two channels track closely. The minimum system is macOS Sonoma 14.

One consequence of the App Store route worth knowing in advance: the app is sandboxed, so its history database lives inside a container folder rather than in a plain Application Support folder. That matters mainly when removing it later.

Learn six keys and the app is finished

The window opens with Shift, Command and C by default. From there, everything happens without the mouse, and the difference between a useful clipboard history and an annoying one is knowing which modifier produces which result.

• Type to filter. The search field narrows the list as characters arrive.
• Enter copies the selected item back to the clipboard. It does not paste it.
• Option and Enter selects the item and pastes it into whatever was in front.
• Option, Shift and Enter pastes it without formatting, which is the one that stops a block of styled text arriving in a plain text field.
• Option and Delete removes a single item from history.
• Option and P pins an item to the top of the list and assigns it a permanent random shortcut. Pressing it again unpins.

Pinning deserves a second look, because it changes what the app is for. An unpinned history is a rolling buffer that eventually loses everything. A pinned item stays at the top with its own shortcut, which makes the list a small holding area for the three or four strings being used all afternoon: a ticket number, an address, a command that has to be retyped. That is a different job from recovering something copied an hour ago, and both fit in the same window.

Two housekeeping keys sit alongside those. Option, Command and Delete clears everything unpinned. Adding Shift to that clears pinned items too. Command and comma opens the settings window, which is where the rest of this article happens.

Holding Option while clicking the menu bar icon switches recording off entirely, so nothing new is captured until it is switched back. Option and Shift together while clicking skips only the next copy. That second one is the quickest answer to the question of what to do before copying a password out of a note.

Paste automatically depends on a permission, not a setting

The most common complaint about this app is that selecting an item does not paste it. The documented fix has two parts, and one of them lives in System Settings.

First, in the General tab, the Behavior section has a Paste automatically toggle. Without it, Enter only puts the item back on the clipboard and the actual paste is still a manual Command and V. There is a companion toggle for pasting without formatting by default, if unstyled text is the normal case rather than the exception.

Second, the app has to appear and be ticked under System Settings, Privacy and Security, Accessibility. Simulating a keystroke into another application is a restricted action on macOS, and without that grant the paste silently does nothing. The app is asking for exactly the access needed to press Command and V on the reader's behalf, which is a reasonable thing to think about before granting it, but there is no version of automatic pasting that works without it.

If both are set and pasting still fails, the next thing to check is the target application rather than this one. Secure input fields deliberately reject synthetic keystrokes.

When macOS has already claimed the hotkey

Assigning a new shortcut sometimes produces a message saying the combination is already in use by a system setting. The documented sequence for that is short.

Open System Settings, Keyboard, then Keyboard Shortcuts. Find the entry holding the combination. The project's own example is Convert text to simplified Chinese, which sits under Services and then Text, and which almost nobody has deliberately configured. Disable it or clear its assignment, restart the app, then set the shortcut again. The restart is part of the documented steps, not an optional extra.

A subtler variant is worth knowing because it looks like a completely different fault. If the chosen shortcut produces a character rather than a bare key combination, Option and C giving a c-cedilla for example, macOS security can block it inside password fields specifically. Everything works normally everywhere else, which makes it confusing. The documented workaround is to use a combination that does not emit a character, such as Command, Shift and C, remapping through Karabiner-Elements if needed.

Decide what never enters the history

A clipboard manager that records everything is a file of everything that was ever copied, including things that should not be written to disk. The defaults handle part of this, and the Ignore tab handles the rest.

Three pasteboard types are always ignored and cannot be re-enabled: the transient, concealed and auto-generated types published under the org.nspasteboard naming convention. Well behaved password managers mark their copies with these, which is why a password copied from one of them does not turn up in history. The site puts this as respecting the clipboard being cleared: if the password manager removes the value, so does the app.

A second list is ignored by default but editable, covering entries such as com.agilebits.onepassword and net.antelle.keeweb. Custom types can be added, and the documentation suggests finding the right identifier with the free Pasteboard Viewer utility rather than guessing.

Two specific additions are worth making deliberately. To keep copies arriving from an iPhone or iPad through Universal Clipboard out of the list, add com.apple.is-remote-clipboard under Ignore and then Pasteboard Types. To exclude a whole application, use the applications list in the same tab. For a workflow that handles sensitive data in bulk, the repository documents a defaults key, ignoreEvents, which can be set true for the duration of the work and back to false afterwards.

How much history to keep, and at what cost

The Storage tab holds three decisions that people tend to leave at their defaults and later regret.

Size sets how many items are retained, and accepts anything from 1 to 999. There is no wrong answer, but there is a trade-off: a longer history is more useful for the once-a-week case of retrieving something from yesterday, and it is also a longer written record sitting on the disk. The pane shows the current size of the database next to the setting, so the effect of a large number is visible rather than theoretical.

Separate toggles control whether text, images and files are saved at all. Turning images off is the single most effective way to keep the database small, since screenshots dominate it. A sort order option decides whether the list is ordered by when items were added or by when they were last used. Last used tends to suit people who reach for the same handful of values repeatedly, while newest first suits people using it to recover something from a few minutes ago.

The General tab also carries a check for updates row with a button to check immediately. Which channel that uses depends on where the app came from, so a copy installed through Homebrew is upgraded with Homebrew and a copy from the App Store updates there. Interface language is not a separate setting: the App Store listing shows 31 languages, and the app follows the system language.

The clipboard is polled rather than pushed, every 500 milliseconds by default. For anyone who copies in fast bursts and finds items occasionally missed, the repository documents a clipboardCheckInterval key that can be lowered, at the cost of slightly more frequent wakeups.

The menu bar question is separate from all of this

The Appearance tab has a Show menu icon toggle and an icon picker, plus a setting to show the most recent copy as text in the menu bar. That second one is genuinely useful and also the most expensive item on this list in terms of horizontal space, because its width changes with whatever was copied last.

This is where clipboard setup collides with something larger. A Mac with a dozen resident utilities has a menu bar where the useful ones are hard to find and, on a laptop with a notch, some are not drawn at all. Switching off individual icons one app at a time solves the width problem by throwing away access, and the decision is then buried in each app's own preferences where nobody revisits it.

The alternative is to keep the icons and manage the row itself. That is what a menu bar manager does: icons stay installed and reachable, but only the ones needed right now occupy space. The Features page describes what that looks like in practice, including opening a hidden item's menu without expanding the row first, and How it compares sets it against the per-app approach of simply switching icons off.

Leave this app's icon visible for the first few weeks regardless. Until the hotkey is muscle memory, it is the guaranteed way back in.

What to change first

Do two things today: turn on Paste automatically and grant Accessibility, then add anything sensitive to the Ignore list. Both take a minute and both are invisible failures if skipped. Leave the history size and the menu bar to a second pass, and when the menu bar comes up, look at the whole row at once rather than this one icon. Koffret is one way to handle that part.