How to Make Copied Text Shorter on Mac
You copied a long paragraph — an email reply, a product description, a chunk of documentation — and now you need a shorter version. Deleting words by hand is slow and it's easy to cut the wrong thing. On a Mac you can compress copied text in a couple of keystrokes.
The manual way (and why it's tedious)
The default approach is to paste the text somewhere editable, then start trimming: remove qualifiers, merge sentences, cut the throat-clearing intro. It works, but it's repetitive, and every time you do it you're making editorial decisions you'd rather hand off.
Shorten copied text with an AI clipboard manager
ClipHistory sits between your copy and your paste. Press Cmd+Shift+V to open your clip history — the last 150 unpinned clips plus everything you've pinned — pick the long text, and run an AI transform.
For making text shorter you have two transforms that matter:
Summarize
Summarize condenses the meaning into fewer words. Use it when you want the gist — the key points without the original phrasing. Good for turning a long status update into a one-liner, or a dense paragraph into a sentence.
Rewrite
Rewrite keeps the intent but reshapes the text, and you can steer it toward "shorter and tighter." Use it when wording matters — a customer-facing sentence you want trimmed without losing the tone.
Both run through the AI provider you set up with your own API key (Anthropic, OpenAI, DeepSeek, Google, or a custom endpoint). The text goes from your Mac straight to that provider and back — no ClipHistory cloud, no account, nothing stored remotely.
A concrete example
Say you copied:
"I just wanted to quickly follow up on the email I sent last week regarding the proposal, and check whether you'd had a chance to take a look at it yet, as we're hoping to move forward fairly soon if possible."
Run Rewrite and you get something like:
"Following up on last week's proposal — have you had a chance to review it? We'd like to move forward soon."
Same message, roughly half the length, ready to paste.
Do it again to go shorter
AI shortening isn't one-and-done. If the first result is still too long:
- Re-run the transform on the output clip. Each pass tends to compress further.
- Switch from Summarize to Rewrite (or back) to change the shape, not just the size.
Because every result lands back in your clip history, you can compare versions and paste whichever fits.
Keep your go-to phrasings
If you constantly shorten the same kinds of text — say, polite-but-brief email closings — turn the result into a snippet. Snippets are reusable bits of text you can drop in instantly, so you stop re-shortening the same boilerplate. Pinned clips and snippets both survive the 150-clip rolling window.
Clean before you shorten
Text copied from a webpage, a PDF, or a chat app often drags formatting with it — odd line breaks, double spaces, leftover bullet characters, or invisible markup. That noise makes shortening worse, because the model wastes effort on the cruft instead of the content.
Run the Clean transform first. It normalizes the text into plain, readable sentences. Then run Summarize or Rewrite on the cleaned result. Since each transform's output is a fresh clip, chaining Clean → Summarize is two quick steps with no manual copy-paste in between. For anything you pasted in from outside, this is the difference between a tidy short version and one that inherits the original's mess.
Why this stays on your Mac
When you shorten text you're often working with real content — a half-finished email, a note about a person, a paragraph from a contract. ClipHistory keeps that local. There's no account and no cloud; your clip history lives on your machine. The app is signed and notarized by Apple and runs as a universal binary on Apple Silicon and Intel under macOS 12+. The only thing that ever leaves your Mac is the AI request you explicitly trigger, sent directly to the provider whose API key you set up. And you reach all of it with one shortcut, Cmd+Shift+V, without leaving the app you're writing in.
Quick recap
- Copy the long text.
- Cmd+Shift+V to open ClipHistory.
- Optionally run Clean to strip formatting.
- Run Summarize (for the gist) or Rewrite (to keep wording, just tighter).
- Re-run if you need it shorter still.
- Paste, pin, or save as a snippet.
No website, no upload, no subscription — the shortening happens on your Mac using the AI key you control.
Ready to put AI to work on your clipboard? Get ClipHistory for macOS ($19.99) — a one-time payment, 12-month license, no auto-renewal. Signed and notarized by Apple, runs on macOS 12+, and everything stays local on your Mac.