ApexDock/ docs
Features

Clipboard History

Records text and images you copy, with keyboard search, AI suggestions, and pin-to-favorite.

Clipboard History is a floating panel that remembers everything you copy. Press the hotkey, search, hit Return to paste.

Enabling

Settings → Clipboard → Enable Clipboard History. The recorder starts immediately.

Hotkey

Default: ⌘⇧V. Configurable from Settings → Clipboard → Hotkey with a "Record New Hotkey" button — hold modifiers and tap the key to capture.

What gets recorded

  • Text — any plain or rich text (RTF, HTML, Markdown). ApexDock stores the plain-text version for search and the original for paste fidelity.
  • Images — PNG/JPEG/TIFF from screenshots, browser drags, design tools.
  • Files — file references record their canonical path; pasting puts the same reference back on the pasteboard.

Search

The panel opens with a search field focused. Type any token; results filter live by:

  • Text content (case-insensitive, fuzzy)
  • App name where it was copied from (from:Safari)
  • Image-only with kind:image
  • Timestamp filter today / yesterday

Enter pastes the top result via a synthesized ⌘V keystroke (requires Accessibility).

AI suggestions

Settings → Clipboard → Enable AI Suggestions adds an AI… action to each entry. Click to:

  • Translate to another language
  • Reformat (markdown → plain text, bullet list → paragraph)
  • Summarise
  • Extract action items / dates / URLs

Uses your Anthropic or OpenAI key from Settings → Assistant. Without a key, the AI button is hidden.

History size

Settings → Clipboard → History Limit (10–200 entries). Older entries fall off the back when the limit is reached.

The Clear All button drops every entry — useful before screen-sharing.

Storage

History is stored in memory while ApexDock is running and persisted to disk on quit:

~/Library/Application Support/ApexDock/clipboard.json

(Plain JSON, not encrypted. Don't enable Clipboard History on a shared user account.)

Notes

  • The recorder watches the system pasteboard for changes a few times a second. It only reads when something actually changed, so it sits at near-zero CPU.
  • The recorder filters out its own paste-back, so pasting from history doesn't create a duplicate entry.
  • Near-identical screenshots are detected and deduplicated, so a flurry of crops doesn't bury everything else.