Beyond cycling and transforming — the quiet moves that add up.
Hit Space twice on anything in your ring and it pops out into its own small floating window, always on top. Keep it open while you work in another app, drag it wherever it’s useful — a screenshot, a snippet, a color swatch — and it stays there until you close it.
Hold V to mark a few items as you cycle past them, then tap G and they collapse into one entry on the ring. Paste the group and every piece lands together, in the order you marked them — a scattered set of screenshots or snippets, treated as one thing.
Hold P on anything you don’t want to lose to the ring’s usual churn, and it locks to the top for good. New copies keep stacking up beneath it, but a pinned item never ages out — until you unpin it yourself.
Your ring can hold more than one collection — work, personal, a specific project — and mid-cycle you can jump straight to any of them by pressing its number, 1 through 9. No backing out to a list first, no losing your place.
Tap F while cycling and start typing — the ring narrows live to just what matches, character by character. Faster than scrolling past everything you’ve ever copied to find the one line you actually need.
Hold V a little longer than a tap while cycling, and the ring pins itself open. Let go of ⌘ after that and nothing closes — it stays right where it is until you paste or dismiss it yourself.
Clipen is a clipboard manager for macOS. Every time you copy something — text, code, a URL, an image — Clipen stores it silently in a ring. You retrieve it later with a two-key shortcut, no mouse required.
Hold ⌘ instead of tapping it. While held, tap V repeatedly to cycle through your clipboard ring — a floating preview shows exactly what will paste. Release ⌘ to paste the highlighted item instantly. One fluid chord, zero context-switching.
100% on-device. Clipen never sends your clipboard contents to any server. Everything is stored locally in an encrypted SQLite database. No cloud sync, no analytics, no telemetry.
Clipen requires macOS 13 Ventura or later. It runs natively on both Apple Silicon (M-series) and Intel Macs. A universal binary is included in every release.
While cycling (holding ⌘, tapping V), hit the Delete key to instantly remove the highlighted item. No confirmation dialog — it's gone. You can also clear the full ring from the menu bar icon in one click.
Click Space mid-cycle to preview the highlighted item — full-size image, scrollable PDF, playable video, 3D model — without losing your place. You're still mid-cycle, still holding ⌘, still free to keep tapping V. Nothing is committed until you release ⌘.
Tap X mid-cycle to open transforms for the highlighted item. The menu is contextual — OCR on a screenshot, "paste specific pages" on a PDF, case tools on text, color conversions on a hex code. You only ever see actions that make sense for what you're holding.
Tap D mid-cycle to break the highlighted item down field by field — a total, a date, an invoice number, whatever Clipen can extract from it. Keep tapping D to step through each field, then release ⌘ to paste just the one you need instead of the whole thing.