Clippy 1.0.14
Four things you couldn't do before, a screenshot editor that behaves the way you'd expect, and a long list of fixes. Still entirely on your Mac — no accounts, no cloud, no telemetry.
✨ New
💬 Ask your clipboard
Stop scrolling for that one thing you copied. Ask for it:
"what was that phone number" · "the link from yesterday" · "my pinned items"
Clippy works out what you're after — timeframe, content type, which app it came from — ranks your history by meaning rather than keyword overlap, and shows the answer with the items it used.
Concrete values are pulled verbatim from the original text instead of being retyped by a model, so a phone number is always the number you actually copied.
Works with local models through Ollama or with a cloud provider, and falls back to on-device matching when no model is configured.
🔎 Screen Text Grab — ⇧⌘2
Drag over any region of your screen and the text inside it goes straight to your clipboard. Text in a video, a PDF that won't let you select, a screenshot someone sent you — if you can see it, you can copy it. QR codes in the selection are decoded too.
🏷 Automatic titles
Every item gets a short, readable title, so your history scans at a glance instead of showing you the first 40 characters of a URL. Titles are searchable, and the whole thing can be switched off in Settings → Features.
🧩 Templates
Clippy notices when you copy the same shape of text again and again — invoice lines, ticket references, standup notes — and offers to turn it into a template with the variable parts turned into fields. You review the suggestion before anything is saved, and dismissing it keeps Clippy quiet.
📱 Send to Phone
Right-click any link → Send to Phone. A QR code appears; point your camera at it and the link opens over there. No pairing, no account, no network round trip.
⌨️ Keyboard navigation
↑ ↓ to move through history, ⏎ to paste, esc to close, ⌘1–⌘9 to paste any of the first nine items directly, ⇥ to move focus between search and the list. Search no longer takes focus when the window opens, so the number shortcuts work the moment Clippy appears.
🚀 Improved
Compare
The diff engine was rewritten from scratch. Large documents now compare comfortably — 4,000 lines in about 3ms — instead of stalling, and the view was redesigned to make changes easier to read. The Close button and esc actually close the window now.
The screenshot editor's text tool
This got the most attention of anything in the release:
Outline / stroke so text stays readable over any background
One-click "Make readable" when you don't want to fiddle with settings
Real point sizes in the Inspector instead of arbitrary numbers
Style presets — save a look you like and reuse it
Vertical alignment and line spacing
Double-click existing text to edit it
Drag to define the area; the box fits your text when you're done and grows again as you add more
Every other annotation tool
Arrows — the head is clearly visible at small sizes now
Highlighter — proper multiply blending, so it highlights instead of covering
Pins, emoji, shapes — shadows, rings, automatic contrast against whatever is behind them, and adjustable sizes again
Clicking an existing annotation selects it instead of stacking a new one on top — across every tool
Your tool settings stick. Pick a size or a colour once and it stays the default
Detection accuracy
Detection used to be too eager — ID numbers and order references were offered as phone numbers to call. Now anything that passes a real checksum (credit cards via Luhn, IBANs via mod-97, national ID numbers) is definitively that thing and can never be reported as something else, and phone matches require an actual phone-shaped format. One detector, one set of rules, everywhere in the app.
Memory
Image handling was reworked end to end: copying and editing images now uses roughly a third of the memory and finishes about 3× faster. Screenshot thumbnails are downscaled while decoding rather than after, and background OCR is queued so several images at once can't pile up.
🐞 Fixed
Dock Preview reliability — previews that wouldn't open, closed when you moved the mouse onto them, or stopped working after you left the dock area. The dock connection recovers on its own if it drops, and a late dismiss animation can no longer close a preview you just opened.
Permissions — declining once meant Clippy never asked again, leaving the feature permanently stuck. It asks again the next time you use it.
A random crash — an internal window-hierarchy problem could exhaust the stack and take the app down at an unrelated moment, most visibly while hovering the dock.
Ask giving up too early — the answer could claim it found nothing while the extracted value was sitting right above it, and its citation always pointed at the first item.
Send to Phone now follows Clippy's own light/dark setting instead of the system's, and closes with esc.
Assorted smaller fixes across the editor, Compare, and the main list.
Requires macOS 13 or later. Update from within Clippy, or download the DMG.