Stop losing what you just copied

ClipSlots gives you 9 keyboard-triggered clipboard slots. Press a hotkey to save, press another to paste — in any app, instantly. A tiny macOS daemon, no GUI.

Install

Documentation

GitHub

ClipSlots mascot — a purple octopus holding numbered clipboards

One daemon. Zero bloat.

A single Swift binary with no GUI, no Electron, no subscription. Runs quietly in the background and gets out of your way.

9 clipboard slots

Copy something, press Ctrl+Opt+3, it's saved. Press Ctrl+3 later, it's back. Slots persist until you clear them.

Works in every app

System-wide hotkeys that work whether you're in VS Code, Chrome, Figma, or Terminal. No focus switching.

Not just text

Copies images, RTF, HTML, and file references exactly as-is. What you copy is what you paste.

Lock & undo

Lock slots holding tokens or boilerplate so they can't be overwritten. Made a mistake? clipslots undo restores the previous value.

Labels & search

Name slots so you remember what's where. list --grep token finds them in a second.

Starts on login, stays hidden

A launchd daemon that runs in the background. No menubar icon, no dock icon, no interruptions.

One config file

Edit ~/.config/clipslots/config.toml to change hotkeys, slot count, expiry, and sounds. Hot-reloads on save.

20+ CLI commands

peek, swap, export, import — script it, alias it, pipe it.

Reference

Full command documentation

Browse the docs

See it in action

All 20+ commands, the rich fastfetch-style status, labels, locks, and undo — in 30 seconds.

ClipSlots terminal demo — clipslots help, status, list, lock, undo

Your Mac won't notice it

ClipSlots uses zero CPU and around 10MB of RAM. Here's proof — real Activity Monitor screenshots with the daemon running.

Process Name % CPU

clipslots 0.0

0% CPU

Process Name Memory

clipslots 10.7 MB

~10 MB RAM

Install in 30 seconds

Install with Homebrew, download the .pkg installer, or build from source.

Recently shipped: undo, slot locking, labels, swap/copy, export/import. See the changelog →

Install via Homebrew

Two commands and you're done.

Grant accessibility

macOS needs this to register global hotkeys. One-time step.

Start

That's it. Hotkeys are now live.

Terminal

# Install
brew tap olafglad/clipslots
brew install clipslots

# Set up and run
clipslots permissions
clipslots start

Stop losing what you just copied

One daemon. Zero bloat.

See it in action

Your Mac won't notice it

Install in 30 seconds

Free, open source, no catch.