Clipnest — Free, Open-Source Clipboard Manager for Mac and Linux
Clipnest is a free, open-source, native clipboard manager for macOS and Linux (Ubuntu with GNOME): full history, instant search, pins, and snippets that expand by keyword in any app.
Install in one line
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AayushGour/clipnest/main/scripts/install.sh | bash
Mac: macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later. Linux: Ubuntu 22.04 or 24.04 with GNOME (X11 or Wayland), amd64 or arm64. Run it as your normal user; on Linux it asks for sudo to install the packages. More on the Download page.
Why Clipnest?
macOS 26 Tahoe added a basic clipboard history to Spotlight (⌘4) — but it’s opt-in, caps out at 7 days, and can’t organize, pin, or expand anything. Clipnest is a free, open-source, native menu-bar app that picks up where that leaves off: history you control, instant search, pinned favorites, and reusable snippets that expand by keyword in any app.
Now on Linux too. Since 1.0, the same Clipnest runs on Ubuntu with GNOME, on X11 or Wayland — a native GTK 4 app built from the same Swift core, with the same history, search, pins, snippets, OCR and Settings.
The permission that doesn’t disappear on update (Mac)
Update Clipnest and you don’t have to re-grant Accessibility. Every release is signed with the same certificate, so the designated code identity macOS ties your permission grant to stays the same across versions — you’re not sent back to System Settings after every update the way you are with apps that rebuild or re-sign between releases. Read the full, honest signing story on the FAQ.
Free, open source, natively built
No Electron, no web view. Clipnest is a small, native Swift app — SwiftUI on the Mac, GTK 4 on Linux — released under the MIT license, with the full source on GitHub. No account, no cloud, no telemetry. See exactly what stays on your computer on the Privacy page.
Snippets you can drop into any app
Save a signature, a boilerplate reply, or a command as a snippet, give it a short Tag, then type that Tag in any app, select it and press a hotkey — Clipnest replaces it with the snippet’s full body. (Nothing expands on its own while you type; if it can’t expand, Clipnest tells you why.) On the Mac it works the same way in native Cocoa apps and in Electron/Chrome-based ones like VS Code or Slack; on Linux it works on both X11 and Wayland. More on the Features page.
What’s in the box
-
Full clipboard history
text, rich text, links, images, and files, captured automatically as you copy.
-
Instant search
filter your whole history as you type, with matches highlighted.
-
Pinned favorites
keep what you reuse most a keystroke away, in a dedicated Pinned tab.
-
Snippets with keyword expansion
Save reusable text under a short Tag, then expand it by keyword in any app with ⌥⌘E on the Mac or Alt+Super+E on Linux.
-
Optional on-device OCR
recognize the text in copied screenshots — with Apple's Vision framework on the Mac, a bundled ONNX Runtime and PP-OCRv5 models on Linux — entirely on your computer, off by default. See the trade-off on the Privacy page before turning it on.
How it compares
A quick, honest look at Clipnest next to Maccy (the established free, open-source option) and Deck (a newer, feature-dense native competitor). A tick means the product has that feature as of October 2026; a blank cell means it doesn’t.
| Feature | Clipnest | Maccy | Deck |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open source (unrestricted license) | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Pinning | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Snippets / text expansion | ✓ | ✓ | |
| On-device OCR | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Fast, native Swift — no Electron | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Runs on Linux | ✓ |
Sources: p0deje/Maccy and its README; yuzeguitarist/Deck, its README, and LICENSE. More on Clipnest’s own pricing, privacy, and permissions in the FAQ.
Ready to try Clipnest?
Free, open source, and a single command away on your Mac or Linux PC.
FAQ · Privacy · Contribute · Changelog