How many items can I pin?

Unlimited. Pinned clips are separate from the rolling 150-clip history and never roll off, no matter how much you copy afterward.

What's the difference between pinned clips and snippets?

Pinned clips are individual items rescued from your rolling history. Snippets are reusable text you save deliberately, ideal for boilerplate you paste often. You can use both.

Are pinned items kept private?

Yes. Pinned and unpinned clips are stored locally on your Mac with no cloud or account. Data leaves only if you run an AI transform using your own API key.

Do pinned clips count against the 150-clip limit?

No. The 150-clip limit applies only to unpinned clips. Pinning moves an item into a separate, unlimited set.

Clipboard Manager for Mac With Pinned Items

Most clipboard managers treat every copy the same: it enters the list, ages, and eventually rolls off. That's fine for the random stuff you copy all day, but it's wrong for the handful of things you paste constantly — your address, a license key, a payment link, a code snippet. Those shouldn't be at the mercy of a rolling window. That's what pinning is for.

How pinning works in ClipHistory

ClipHistory keeps two kinds of clips:

Unpinned clips — your last 150 copies. New copies push old ones off the end. This is your working history.
Pinned clips — items you've marked to keep. They are unlimited and never roll off, no matter how much you copy afterward.

To pin a clip, open your history with Cmd+Shift+V, find the item, and pin it. From then on it lives in your pinned set, separate from the churn of everyday copies.

Why two tiers matters

If everything competed for the same 150 slots, a busy afternoon of copying would bury the things you actually reuse. Separating pinned from unpinned means your essentials are always one shortcut away, while the rolling window stays useful for "what did I just copy?"

What's worth pinning

A few categories where pinning pays off immediately:

Boilerplate text — your email signature, a standard reply, a meeting blurb
Addresses and contact details — shipping address, office address, support email
Keys and IDs — license keys, API endpoints, account numbers (stored locally, see privacy below)
Snippets — a code block, a SQL query, a markdown table you reuse
Links — a booking link, a docs URL, a payment link

Pinned clips vs. snippets and boards

ClipHistory gives you a few ways to organize, and they overlap a little:

Pinned clips are individual items rescued from the rolling history.
Snippets are reusable text you save deliberately, ideal for boilerplate you type often.
Boards group related clips together — a board per project or client keeps everything for that work in one place.

You can mix all three. A common pattern: snippets for your standard phrases, pinned clips for the current project's must-haves, and boards to keep each project's research separate.

Finding pinned items fast

Pinned items are searchable just like the rest of your history. Open Cmd+Shift+V, start typing, and the list filters live across pinned and unpinned clips. You can also use type filters to narrow to links, images, or text.

When you need to paste several pinned values in a row — say, filling out a form with your name, address, and phone — the paste stack lets you queue them and paste in sequence instead of returning to the list each time.

Where pinned clips live

Everything — pinned and unpinned — is stored locally on your Mac. There's no cloud, no account, and no sync. That's worth noting given pinning is exactly where you'd keep sensitive items like keys: they never leave the machine.

The only time any clip leaves your Mac is if you deliberately run an AI transform (summarize, rewrite, translate, clean). Those use your own API key with one of five providers — Anthropic, OpenAI, DeepSeek, Google, or a custom endpoint — and go straight to that provider.

Requirements

ClipHistory is signed and notarized by Apple, so it opens without a Gatekeeper warning. It's a universal binary (Apple Silicon and Intel) and needs macOS 12 or later.

A workflow built around pins

Once you've pinned your essentials, your daily flow changes. Instead of hunting through documents or retyping the same address, you press Cmd+Shift+V, and your pinned set is right there at the top. For people who fill out a lot of forms, the combination of pinned clips and the paste stack is the real time-saver: queue your name, address, phone, and email, then paste them in sequence field by field without ever leaving the keyboard.

Pins also pair well with AI transforms. Pin a paragraph of boilerplate once, and any time you paste it you can rewrite it for a different audience or translate it on the spot — using your own API key — without editing the saved version. The pinned original stays clean; the transform happens at paste time.

When to pin vs. when to let it roll off

Not everything deserves a pin. A good rule of thumb:

Pin anything you'll reuse beyond today — signatures, keys, addresses, recurring snippets.
Don't pin one-off copies. Let the rolling 150-clip window hold them; if you need one again within the session, it's still there to search.

Over-pinning recreates the clutter problem you were trying to avoid, so keep the pinned set to things that genuinely earn permanent residency. You can always unpin an item when a project ends.

Getting set up with pins

Install ClipHistory and grant accessibility permission.
Copy the five things you paste most often.
Open Cmd+Shift+V and pin each one.
Optionally, group project clips into a board.

Two minutes of setup, and your most-used clips are permanently one shortcut away. ClipHistory is a one-time $19.99 purchase with a 12-month license and no auto-renewal.

Stop losing what you copied. ClipHistory keeps your last 150 clips (plus unlimited pinned ones) right under Cmd+Shift+V — local, private, no account. Get ClipHistory for macOS — $19.99 one-time.