On macOS 26 Tahoe the clipboard history is inside Spotlight: press ⌘Space, then ⌘4, and click Enable the first time, because it is off until you do. On any earlier macOS there is no history at all; Finder’s Edit → Show Clipboard shows only the last thing you copied, and a clipboard manager such as Maccy, Paste or Raycast fills the gap. Checked on 22 September 2026 against Apple’s Mac User Guide and a Mac running macOS 26.5.2.
macOS 26: turn on clipboard history in Spotlight
Apple added clipboard history in macOS 26 and put it inside Spotlight rather than in a separate app. It is off until you switch it on, and the switch is a prompt the first time you look.
- Press ⌘Space to open Spotlight.
- Press ⌘4, or click the Clipboard button to the right of the search field.
- The first time, Spotlight asks you to click Enable. Apple’s note next to it: “Sensitive information may appear on the Clipboard.”
- Type to search the list, or scroll it. To use an item, click the copy icon to its right (or select it and press ⌘C), then ⌘V where you want it.
The switch also lives in System Settings → Spotlight, at the bottom, as Results from Clipboard: “Allow Spotlight to search and display items you’ve copied to your clipboard. Personal and sensitive information may appear in search results.” Turn it off there and the Clipboard button disappears from Spotlight. Next to it is Clear Clipboard History; inside Spotlight the same thing is the More button (…) to the right of the search field, then Clear History.
How long it keeps things. Eight hours by default. Since macOS 26.1 (November 2025) you can pick 30 minutes, 8 hours or 7 days in the same Spotlight settings. Whatever you pick, the list is a rolling window: an item older than that is gone, and there is no pinning and no folders.
What it keeps and what it drops. Text, links, images and files go in. Formatting does not: pasting from Spotlight gives you plain text. Copies from Apple’s Passwords app are excluded. Items copied on an iPhone or iPad and pasted through Universal Clipboard are not saved, and some apps (Mail is the usual example) do not populate the history. Everything else you copy is in the list, which is what Apple’s warning is about.
Before macOS 26: Finder shows one item
Every macOS up to Sequoia (15) has one clipboard slot and one way to look at it: click the desktop so Finder is active, then Edit → Show Clipboard. A small window shows the current item, text or a file name, and nothing older. Copy something else and the previous item is gone. The menu item is still there on macOS 26 and still shows only the last item; it has nothing to do with the Spotlight history.
That is the whole built-in answer for Sequoia, Sonoma, Ventura and earlier. If you need the thing you copied before the last thing, you need a clipboard manager.
Clipboard managers
Four options, all checked on their own sites on 22 September 2026. Prices are in US dollars as shown there.
| Price | Keeps | Open with | Notes | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spotlight (macOS 26, built in) | Free | 8 hours by default; 30 min, 8 h or 7 days since 26.1 | ⌘Space, then ⌘4 | Plain text on paste; excludes Passwords app copies; no pinning |
| Maccy | Free and open source (MIT); $9.99 on the Mac App Store if you want it from there | On your Mac, never leaves it; ignores copy types marked confidential by default | ⇧⌘C | macOS 14 or later; the site says it “will always be free” |
| Paste | $2.49 a month or $29.99 a year, 7-day trial | “Everything you copy is saved, with no limit”; syncs to iPhone and iPad through your iCloud | ⇧⌘V | Pinboards; rules to exclude apps such as password managers |
| Raycast | Free tier includes Clipboard History with 3 months of history; Pro from $10 a month makes it unlimited | Up to 3 months (free) or unlimited (Pro); encrypted on your disk | ⌥Space, then type Clipboard History, or set a hotkey | Text, images, colors, links; ignores password managers by default |
Which one: Maccy if you want free and small, Paste if you want the history on your phone too, Raycast if you already use it as a launcher. Spotlight is enough if “the thing from an hour ago” is the whole problem.
What no clipboard history has
Every list above has the same shape: it starts when you press ⌘C. The link a colleague dropped in Slack yesterday that you read and did not copy, the error that scrolled past in a terminal, the address in an email you closed: none of it was ever on the clipboard, so no clipboard history, Apple’s or anyone’s, can show it. And a clipboard is a list of fragments with no source. The item is there; where it came from is not.
That is the gap Sharpy sits in. It is not a clipboard manager: it is a to-do list for Mac that reads the text on your screen (chats, documents, web pages, code, terminals) through macOS Accessibility and keeps it on your Mac, with no video and no screenshots. Ask for “the Notion link from Slack yesterday” and the answer cites the moment it was on screen, with the source to open; the asks and promises in that text become tasks on its list. Card numbers, keys and codes are masked, and passwords, banking and private windows are never saved. When it pastes a draft for you, it puts your own clipboard back afterwards, so it does not eat what you had copied.
Sharpy is free in early access on Macs with Apple silicon: join the waitlist. The longer version of how it reads your screen is in What is screen memory, and how does a Mac app keep it?.
