PeekPaste

PeekPaste is a native clipboard manager for Mac, built by LucidBit, that keeps a thoughtful history of what you copy — text, code, links, images, colours and files — and brings it back with a simple gesture. Move your pointer to the edge of the screen and a panel of your recent clips slides in over your work; choose one and it goes straight back into the app you were in. It is designed for macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later as a native Apple Silicon (arm64) app, and it is aimed at anyone who copies and pastes throughout the day and wants that history to be instantly, unobtrusively reachable. The clipboard on macOS is a single slot: the moment you copy something new, whatever was there before is gone. That is fine until you need a snippet you copied half an hour ago, an address you copied before a phone call, or a screenshot that is still sitting somewhere on your desktop. The usual workarounds — keeping a scratch document, re-copying from the source app, or taking another screenshot — all cost attention. PeekPaste's answer is to treat the clipboard as something worth remembering. It stores your history locally, presents each item in a form that matches what it actually is, and makes retrieving it a matter of one small gesture rather than a search through other applications. The trigger is deliberately physical. Push your pointer against an edge of the screen and PeekPaste appears over whatever you were doing. You choose which edge, how long the pointer has to dwell there before the panel opens, and you can turn the edge trigger off entirely in favour of a global keyboard shortcut — or use both together. Hovering a card and pressing Space opens a full preview of the clip; move to the next card and the preview follows. Because the panel is an overlay rather than a window, there is no Dock icon and no window to manage, and light mode, dark mode and Reduce Motion are all respected. Each clip is presented for what it is. Code is syntax-highlighted, links carry their title and preview, colours become swatches, and files remain files; every item also remembers the app it came from. That context matters when a history grows, because a colour or a file name is far easier to recognise visually than it is as an anonymous row of text. Previewing before pasting means you can confirm the right clip — full-size images, readable documents, highlighted code — without leaving the app you are working in. Screenshots are a special case that PeekPaste handles on-device. Text inside captured images is recognised on your Mac and made searchable, so a screenshot of an error message, a receipt or a slide can be found by searching for words that appear inside the picture, exactly as if that text had been copied normally. The recognition runs locally; nothing about the image or the extracted text is uploaded. Beyond raw history, PeekPaste offers structure. You can pin the clips you reach for constantly, file the rest into categories you name and colour yourself, and filter the history when you need to narrow things down. You control how long clips are kept — a week, a month, a year, or forever — and older items clear themselves when their time is up. Transforms let you change the way a clip leaves the app: strip formatting so pasted text matches its destination, change case, trim whitespace, or encode a URL, all without touching the original. Privacy is a design decision rather than a setting. PeekPaste has no analytics, no account and no clipboard sync server; everything is local and stays on your Mac. When a password manager marks content as confidential, macOS flags it and PeekPaste honours that flag — the clip can be pasted again but is never legible on screen. You can also switch off password capture entirely, name specific apps that PeekPaste should never record from, or mark an individual clip as sensitive. When you copy a web link, PeekPaste can fetch that link's preview; your clipboard contents are not otherwise sent to LucidBit. If you want automatic pasting, PeekPaste asks for Accessibility permission so it can return to the app you were using and send the paste command for you — and you can skip that entirely, in which case the clip is simply placed on your clipboard ready to paste normally. The overall approach is gesture-first and local-first. Rather than asking you to learn a new place to look, PeekPaste borrows the edge of the screen you already use and stays out of the way until you summon it. Rather than sending your clipboard to a service, it keeps everything on the machine and gives you explicit controls over what is remembered. And rather than treating all clips as interchangeable strings, it renders each one in a form that reflects its type and origin. The benefit is time and attention. The thing you copied is still there when you need it, whether that was a minute or a month ago, and retrieving it takes a gesture rather than a detour. Because every item is previewed in its natural form, you paste with confidence instead of guesswork. Because retention, categories and pins are yours to configure, the history stays useful instead of becoming another inbox to manage. And because nothing leaves the Mac, using it does not require trusting a cloud service with your clipboard. Concrete workflows show where this matters. A developer copying functions, commands and configuration values keeps a syntax-highlighted, searchable trail of snippets that can be pasted again without returning to the source file. Someone reviewing an error message that arrived as a screenshot can search for the words inside the image rather than retyping them. A designer working with colours can revisit a swatch copied earlier and paste it into a document or codebase. Anyone collecting research can find a link by its title and preview instead of by its URL characters. Clips can be dragged directly into any app, or dropped on the Desktop to be saved as a file. And for people handling sensitive material, the app rules and confidentiality handling mean a searchable history can exist without a password manager's output ever being legible on screen. PeekPaste is a Mac-only, native arm64 build requiring macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later. Pricing is a one-time $9.99 purchase with a 7-day free trial; there is no subscription, every feature is unlocked from day one, lifetime updates are included, and no account is required. It is available from the Mac App Store or through Lemon Squeezy, with secure checkout via App Store local pricing or Lemon Squeezy in USD, powered by Stripe. A Product Hunt launch offer of $6.99 (30% off) using code PEEKPASTEPH was valid until September 30 for the first 50 redemptions. It will suit developers, designers, writers, researchers and privacy-conscious Mac users who want clipboard history that is fast to summon and stays on the machine. PeekPaste takes the most disposable part of a Mac workflow — the single clipboard slot — and turns it into a private, searchable, gesture-accessible history of text, code, links, images, colours and files. Your clipboard, within reach, and nothing of it anywhere but your Mac.