does macOS have clipboard history?

since macOS 26 Tahoe, yes — inside Spotlight. ⌘Space then ⌘4. on Sequoia and earlier there is nothing at all, and the clipboard holds exactly one item.

how do i turn on clipboard history on Mac?

you do not have to find a switch first: press ⌘Space then ⌘4, and the first time, Spotlight shows a consent sheet with «Allow» and «Not Now» buttons. pick «Allow» and it starts recording from that point on. afterwards it lives in System Settings → Spotlight as a switch named «Results from Clipboard».

how long does Spotlight keep clipboard history?

eight hours unless you change it. the row «Clipboard history is available in Spotlight» sits at the bottom of System Settings → Spotlight with the figure beside it and a stepper to move it. Apple's own page never mentions the setting, which is why the number is so often reported as unpublished.

why is ⌘4 not opening my clipboard history?

either the Mac is older than macOS 26, or something else has taken the shortcut. ⌘4 is a Spotlight Quick Key rather than a fixed binding, and when it is taken Spotlight says «This keyboard shortcut is already in use by the system or another application». System Settings → Spotlight has a «Reset Quick Keys…» button that puts the defaults back.

can i pin something so it stays?

not in the built-in history — there is no such control on the panel. everything expires on the same schedule, however much you needed that particular one.

why does pbpaste show nothing when i copied a file?

because `pbpaste` reads plain text, rtf and PostScript and nothing else — its man page says it prints nothing when none of the three is present. copy a file and `clipboard info` reports «class furl» while `pbpaste` returns zero bytes. the file is on the clipboard; the shell tool cannot see that kind.

is clipboard history a security risk?

it can be, which is why concealed input is excluded: a password manager marks what it puts on the clipboard, and macOS skips it. Spotlight spells the rest out on the consent sheet before it records anything. what matters after that is whether the history stays on your Mac or is synced somewhere.

how do i clear my clipboard history?

System Settings → Spotlight, a button named «Clear Clipboard History»; the confirmation says it is removed from search results on this device. in hop, the list is cleared from the module and quitting is not required. clearing is per-tool — emptying one does not empty the other.

you copied over the thing you needed

updated 15 Sept 2026 · by Anton Shakirov

if you are on macOS 26 Tahoe or later, your Mac already has this and most people do not know: press ⌘Space for Spotlight, then ⌘4, and the last things you copied are listed there. click one and it is back on the clipboard. it is not switched on for you — the first time you look, Spotlight asks — but that is one button, and for the ordinary version of this problem it is the whole answer. start there before installing anything.

Mac clipboard history: where it lives and how to switch it on

turning it on

⌘Space to open Spotlight.
⌘4 to switch to the clipboard section.
the first time, Spotlight puts a consent sheet in front of you rather than a list: «Spotlight can search and display items you've copied to your clipboard. Personal and sensitive information may appear in search results.» the buttons are «Allow» and «Not Now», and nothing is recorded until you pick the first one.
after that, ⌘Space then ⌘4 goes straight to the list. click an entry and it is back on the clipboard, ready to paste.

read that sheet before you click through it. what you are switching on is a list of everything you copy, sitting behind a keystroke with no password on it. on a Mac other people use, that is a different proposition than on your own.

what the settings panel actually gives you

System Settings → Spotlight holds two controls and no more: a switch called «Results from Clipboard» and a button called «Clear Clipboard History». those are the exact names, and there is nothing else on the panel about the clipboard.
clearing asks you to confirm, and the confirmation says the history «will be removed from Spotlight search results on this device», so there is no second copy elsewhere to go and clear.
there is no retention setting, no depth setting, and no pin. the panel does not offer them, so no amount of digging will find them.

the clipboard is not the only thing macOS 26 moved into Spotlight — Launchpad went the same way: open your apps without Launchpad

the rest of what that release rearranged, if you have just updated and things are not where you left them: what macOS 26 changed for menu bar apps

if ⌘4 does nothing

⌘4 is not a fixed shortcut — it is one of Spotlight's Quick Keys, and Quick Keys can be reassigned. if something else has taken it, Spotlight says so in as many words: «This keyboard shortcut is already in use by the system or another application.» the way out is on the same settings panel, in a button called «Reset Quick Keys…», which restores Spotlight's shortcuts to their defaults.

if the panel has no clipboard controls at all, the machine is older than the feature: it arrived in macOS 26, and on Sonoma or Sequoia none of this exists. check under System Settings → General → About before concluding something is broken.

Apple documents the section and how to clear it, though not how long it keeps things: search your clipboard history in Spotlight

where the built-in clipboard history stops

how long entries last is not a mystery, though most writing on the subject treats it as one. System Settings → Spotlight has a row reading «Clipboard history is available in Spotlight», and on a Mac where nobody has changed it, the figure beside that row is eight hours. a stepper next to the figure moves it. the panel is long and the row sits at the very bottom, which is most of why the number gets reported as undocumented — including, until this revision, by us.

no pinning, and a window that starts at eight hours

nothing can be marked as worth keeping. the address you will need every day this month expires on exactly the same schedule as a verification code you used once and never want to see again.
depth follows from the same thing: a day of ordinary work is dozens of entries, so the snippet from Tuesday is behind several hundred of them even before the window closes on it.

plain text, and a ceiling on how much of it

formatting is stripped. copy a styled paragraph, pull it back out of the history, and you get the words without the styling.
there is a length cap on text, so a very long paste is not guaranteed to come back whole.
app-specific objects — a drawing shape, a spreadsheet range with its formatting — do not survive the trip either.

what a dedicated clipboard history does differently, module by module: clipboard history

and some things never reach the list at all — concealed input from a password manager by design, anything copied on an iPhone, and whatever Mail put there. the last section on this page is about those.

a careful walk-through of the section's behaviour and its limits, from someone who tested rather than repeated: MacMost on the Spotlight clipboard history

the short answer, before the rest of this page: if you copied over something you were about to paste and it happened today, ⌘Space then ⌘4 is the end of it and you need nothing else. the simple case stops the moment the thing you want is older than the window, or the moment you find yourself copying the same snippet back in for the fourth day running.

if the thing you wanted would not let you select it in the first place, the clipboard is the wrong end of the problem: copy text from a video or a locked document

how hop keeps everything you copied

hop keeps the last hundred things you copied, up to three hundred if you raise it, and the list is searchable. one click copies an entry back; one more pastes it straight into the app you were just working in. text, links, screenshots and whole files sit in the same list.

against macOS 26 the honest comparison is horizon, not existence — Spotlight covers today for free. so here is where the two actually part company.

what you are doing	the built-in history	with hop
you copied over the address you were about to paste, ten minutes ago	⌘Space, ⌘4, click it. done, and free	not needed — use Spotlight
the snippet you want is from Tuesday	gone unless you widened the window first: it starts at eight hours	the last hundred entries, three hundred if you raise it
one address you paste over and over all month	nothing can be pinned; it expires like everything else	stays in the list until it falls off the end of it
the Mac in front of you is on Sequoia or earlier	there is no clipboard history at all	works on macOS 14 and up

copied files are kept by name — several grabbed at once show as «name +N» — and pasting puts the actual file back, not a path to it.
passwords and other concealed input are never stored, on the same principle macOS uses.
the history never leaves this Mac. nothing is synced anywhere, which is the other half of what «is this safe» comes down to.
colours picked with hop's colour picker and text lifted by its recognition land in the same list, so those are recoverable the same way.

the colour picker end of that, if you got here from a hex code rather than a paragraph: get the hex code of a colour on screen

and the recognition end, which writes into the clipboard history as it reads: text recognition

when what you copied is not in the list at all

the Terminal says the clipboard is empty

if you checked with `pbpaste` and got nothing back, that is not evidence the copy failed. `pbpaste` reads three types and only three: its man page offers `-Prefer txt`, `rtf` or `ps`, and states that when none of those is on the pasteboard it produces no output. a file and an image are neither.

the demonstration takes ten seconds. put a file on the clipboard with `osascript -e 'set the clipboard to (POSIX file "/etc/hosts")'`, then ask twice. `osascript -e 'clipboard info'` answers «class furl», 17 — the file is right there. `pbpaste` answers with zero bytes. copy an image and it is starker still: `clipboard info` lists ten representations of it, PNG and TIFF and JPEG among them, and `pbpaste` again prints nothing.

so the clipboard holds more than the shell can show you, and a blank `pbpaste` means «not text», not «not there». look in the history panel instead.

the pasteboard is a set of typed representations rather than a string, which is why one reader can see it and another cannot: NSPasteboard

the other reasons it is genuinely gone

you copied it before any history existed — before macOS 26, or before you installed something that keeps one. nothing recovers a clipboard retroactively; it was never written down in the first place.
it was a password or a card number out of a password manager. those are marked concealed and deliberately skipped, and that is working as intended.
it was copied on your iPhone and you expected it on the Mac. Universal Clipboard carries the latest item across and nothing more — there is no shared history between devices, in either direction.
you copied it out of Mail, which does not feed the built-in list reliably.
the app put something unusual on the clipboard — a drawing object, a spreadsheet range. it may well be stored, but it only pastes back into something that understands it.

pasting straight into the app underneath needs Accessibility, which is why a clipboard manager asks for it and why the paste silently does nothing until you grant it: why Mac apps ask for accessibility

the module itself, with what it keeps and what it refuses to: clipboard history

frequently asked questions

does macOS have clipboard history?: since macOS 26 Tahoe, yes — inside Spotlight. ⌘Space then ⌘4. on Sequoia and earlier there is nothing at all, and the clipboard holds exactly one item.
how do i turn on clipboard history on Mac?: you do not have to find a switch first: press ⌘Space then ⌘4, and the first time, Spotlight shows a consent sheet with «Allow» and «Not Now» buttons. pick «Allow» and it starts recording from that point on. afterwards it lives in System Settings → Spotlight as a switch named «Results from Clipboard».
how long does Spotlight keep clipboard history?: eight hours unless you change it. the row «Clipboard history is available in Spotlight» sits at the bottom of System Settings → Spotlight with the figure beside it and a stepper to move it. Apple's own page never mentions the setting, which is why the number is so often reported as unpublished.
why is ⌘4 not opening my clipboard history?: either the Mac is older than macOS 26, or something else has taken the shortcut. ⌘4 is a Spotlight Quick Key rather than a fixed binding, and when it is taken Spotlight says «This keyboard shortcut is already in use by the system or another application». System Settings → Spotlight has a «Reset Quick Keys…» button that puts the defaults back.
can i pin something so it stays?: not in the built-in history — there is no such control on the panel. everything expires on the same schedule, however much you needed that particular one.
why does pbpaste show nothing when i copied a file?: because `pbpaste` reads plain text, rtf and PostScript and nothing else — its man page says it prints nothing when none of the three is present. copy a file and `clipboard info` reports «class furl» while `pbpaste` returns zero bytes. the file is on the clipboard; the shell tool cannot see that kind.
is clipboard history a security risk?: it can be, which is why concealed input is excluded: a password manager marks what it puts on the clipboard, and macOS skips it. Spotlight spells the rest out on the consent sheet before it records anything. what matters after that is whether the history stays on your Mac or is synced somewhere.
how do i clear my clipboard history?: System Settings → Spotlight, a button named «Clear Clipboard History»; the confirmation says it is removed from search results on this device. in hop, the list is cleared from the module and quitting is not required. clearing is per-tool — emptying one does not empty the other.

the tool behind this

clipboard historyeverything you copied — text, links, screenshots and whole files.

done with clipboard

other things people do

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close the lid, and the download stopskeep awake
a cloth over the keys types four hundred characterskeyboard lock

Anton Shakirovmakes hop

makes hop and every page on this site. eighteen tools under a single menu bar icon, MIT licensed and open source. reads and answers issues and email himself.

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