Documentation

Quick start

FZClip runs in your menu bar and can be summoned anytime:

1. Click the FZClip icon in the menu bar, or press the show/hide shortcut you picked during onboarding (set or change it any time in Settings → Keyboard)
2. Start typing to search your clipboard history
3. Press Return to grab the item — or ⌘ Return to paste it straight into the app you came from (turn on auto-paste in Settings to make plain Return do that too)

FZClip monitors your clipboard automatically. Just copy anything and it’s saved instantly.

Views

FZClip organizes your content into five specialized views. Click the tabs at the top to switch, or assign Next / Previous View shortcuts in Settings → Keyboard.

Clipboard

Your real-time clipboard history with fuzzy search. Everything you copy is saved here automatically.

Shell

Your shell command history, read from the history file zsh or bash already keeps — searchable and favoritable like everything else. Off by default: enable it by selecting your history file under Settings → Views → Shell History File.

Favorites

Bookmark frequently used items for quick access. Assign a Toggle Favorite shortcut in Settings → Keyboard to flip items in and out of Favorites without leaving the keyboard.

Images

Visual content with optional OCR text extraction. When OCR is enabled, you can search images by their text content.

Notes

Create and store custom text notes. Perfect for code snippets, templates, or any text you use frequently. Assign a Create Note shortcut in Settings → Keyboard for one-press note creation.

Key features

Fuzzy search

Find items with partial matches and substrings. Type “cmd” to find “command” or “git push” to find any item containing both words.

FZClip also supports fzf-style syntax for advanced queries:

• 'exact — Exact match (items must contain “exact”)
• ^prefix — Starts with “prefix”
• suffix$ — Ends with “suffix”
• !exclude — Exclude items containing “exclude”
• ^start !skip end$ — Combine multiple patterns

Auto-paste

When enabled in settings, selecting an item automatically pastes it into the active application. No extra steps needed.

Sensitive content blur

FZClip can automatically blur content copied from password managers — 1Password, LastPass, and Bitwarden are detected out of the box. Tweak the list under Settings → Privacy → Manage Blurred Apps to add browsers or other apps you want covered.

Image OCR

Extracts text from copied images using the macOS Vision framework. This enables searching through screenshots and images by their text content.

Data persistence

Your clipboard history survives app restarts and system reboots. You can also export/import your data for backups or migration.

Settings

Open settings with ⌘ , or from the menu bar icon. Settings are organized into seven tabs.

General

• Launch at login — Start FZClip automatically when you log in
• Auto-paste on select — Automatically paste when selecting an item
• Preserve last view — Remember which view you were on when reopening
• Follow active screen — Show window on the same screen as the active application
• Search result sorting — Choose how search results are ordered
• Search query history — Press ↑ in the search field to recall previous searches

Appearance

• Theme — Choose Light, Dark, or follow system appearance
• Glass opacity — Adjust the transparency of the glass effect
• Tint color — Customize the window background tint
• Highlight color — Choose the selection highlight color
• Highlight matching text — Highlight search query matches in results
• Show item details — Display content length and timestamps
• Show total items count — Display total number of items in the footer
• Hide dock icon — Run as a pure menu-bar app

Views

• Enable / disable views — Show or hide Shell, Favorites, Images, and Notes in the tab bar (Clipboard is always shown)
• Shell History File — Select your shell history file; required before the Shell view can appear
• Enable OCR — Toggle text extraction from images

Keyboard

Record key combinations for the customizable in-app actions and the global show/hide hotkey. See Keyboard shortcuts for the full list.

Privacy

• Accessibility — Status of the accessibility permission. Required for the global hotkey, clipboard monitoring, and auto-paste
• Blur sensitive content — Automatically blur content from password managers
• Manage Blurred Apps — Pick exactly which apps should trigger the blur

Storage

• Limit history size — Cap the number of items kept. Only newly added items are trimmed — your existing history is never deleted
• Export All / Import — Back up or restore clipboard history, notes, and terminal favorites in one bundle
• Restore Backup — Restore from the internal automatic backup (created in the background; no settings to configure)
• Fix Corrupted — Run a repair pass on the history file when something looks off
• Export History Only — Legacy clipboard-history-only export
• Clear Items — Permanently remove items (favorites are always preserved)
• Open in Finder — Show FZClip’s storage folder

About

• Automatic update checks — Check for new releases in the background
• Automatically download updates — Fetch new builds when they appear
• Beta updates — Opt in to beta builds in addition to stable releases

Keyboard shortcuts

FZClip ships without preset shortcuts for in-app actions — pick whatever fits your muscle memory in Settings → Keyboard. A handful of navigation keys are always active when the window is focused; those are listed in the second table and cannot be remapped.

Customizable shortcuts

Open Settings → Keyboard and record a key combination for any action below. Until you record one, the action has no shortcut (it still works through clicks, menus, and the search field).

Built-in shortcuts

These work whenever the FZClip window is focused and are not configurable.