Maccy's history is keyboard-first, and Accessibility decides whether it pastes

Two lookalike domains distribute malware under this name

The README opens with a warning before it describes the software at all. Malicious sites, naming maccyapp.net and maccyapp.com, distribute malware disguised as Maccy, and maccy.app is stated to be the only official website.

That warning is the reason the install section is short. There are two legitimate routes: download the latest version from the releases page on GitHub, or use Homebrew with:

brew install maccy

The consequence for anyone searching for this tool is that the name is not a safe search term. A download page that looks plausible, uses the right icon, and is not maccy.app may be serving a malicious build, and the failure would surface on your machine rather than at install time. Treat the domain as part of the product: if the URL is not maccy.app or a GitHub release, stop, whatever the page looks like.

Every action has three ways to trigger it

The usage list is built around one idea: the popup opens with SHIFT and COMMAND and C, or by clicking the menu bar icon, and then you type to find what you want. What follows is a matrix of three routes to each outcome. To select and copy, press ENTER, click the item, or use COMMAND and n. To select and paste, use OPTION with ENTER, OPTION with a click, or OPTION with n. To paste without formatting, add SHIFT to any of those. To delete an item, OPTION and DELETE.

There is one asymmetry worth remembering. Pinning an item, with OPTION and P, moves it to the top of the list and assigns it a random but permanent keyboard shortcut, and pressing the same combination again unpins it. So a pinned item has a shortcut you cannot predict, only read off the item.

The cost of this density is memorisation. Three input routes per operation is generous to a power user and confusing to everyone else, and the unpin shortcut is the same key that pinned the item, which means one mispress changes state rather than doing nothing. Copy the three modifier combinations for the operation you use most and ignore the rest until the rest becomes useful.

Without Accessibility permission, items copy but never paste

The first FAQ entry answers the question that new users ask most, and it has two steps. Enable Paste automatically in Preferences, and add Maccy to the Accessibility list under System Settings, Privacy and Security.

The second step is the one that gets missed. Until the app appears in that list, selecting a history item does not paste.

The consequence is worth stating plainly: a clipboard manager on macOS cannot work as described until you grant it a permission that gives it access to your input. Grant it deliberately, after installing from a source you trust.

Two behaviours are reachable only through the defaults command

Some settings are not in the Preferences window and are written straight to the preference store instead. The first is ignoring copied items, which is useful when a workflow involves copying sensitive data:

defaults write org.p0deje.Maccy ignoreEvents true # default is false

Set it to true, copy the data, set it back to false. The menu bar offers the same thing: clicking the menu icon with OPTION held disables Maccy and ignores new copies, and adding SHIFT ignores only the next copy.

The second is the clipboard check interval. Maccy checks the clipboard every 500 ms by default, and the interval can be shortened with a write of `clipboardCheckInterval 0.1`, which the comment identifies as 100 ms. A third setting follows the same pattern, `defaults write org.p0deje.Maccy showFooter 1`, which restores the footer if enabling it in Preferences did not take effect.

Three pasteboard types are always ignored, five only by default

Maccy ignores copy types it considers confidential or temporary, and the list is split into two tiers. The types that are always in the list are `org.nspasteboard.TransientType`, `org.nspasteboard.ConcealedType`, and `org.nspasteboard.AutoGeneratedType`. The types included in the default configuration but removable or overwritable are `com.agilebits.onepassword`, `com.typeit4me.clipping`, `de.petermaurer.TransientPasteboardType`, `Pasteboard generator type`, and `net.antelle.keeweb`.

The split is the design. The first group is content marked as transient or concealed by the system, which would be wrong to record under any configuration. The second group is a convenience guess about password managers and autofill tools, so someone who wants 1Password entries in their clipboard history can remove that default, and someone who does not can leave it.

To find what an application declares, the documentation points at a free Pasteboard Viewer utility: open it, copy something from the application you want to handle, and read the custom types in the left sidebar. There is a worked example of doing exactly this for Adobe InDesign.

Universal Clipboard is ignored only after you add its type

macOS Universal Clipboard copies what you copy on an iPhone to the clipboard on your Mac, which is convenient until it silently fills a history list with phone copies. Maccy ships without ignoring it, and the fix is a settings entry rather than a switch: open Preferences, go to Ignore, then Pasteboard Types, and add `com.apple.is-remote-clipboard`.

The consequence is one-directional by default. Until that type is in the ignore list, anything you copy on the phone appears in Maccy history on the Mac, including whatever you copied from a password manager or a private message there. Pinning is not a substitute, because an unwanted item is already recorded before you decide to keep it.

Add the type during setup rather than after you find a surprise entry. The setting lives with the other pasteboard types in the same panel, so the ignore rules and this one are configured in a single place.

A hotkey macOS already owns needs a system change and a restart

Assigning a shortcut in Maccy can fail with a message that the hotkey is already used in some system setting. The documented procedure is five steps, and the order matters. Open System Settings, then Keyboard, then Keyboard Shortcuts, and find where that combination is already taken. The example given is Convert text to simplified Chinese, which sits under Services and Text. Disable that hotkey or remove the assigned combination. Restart Maccy. Then assign the hotkey in Maccy settings.

The consequence is that the last step does not work until the fourth one has happened. A Maccy restart is required after the system-side change, and a restart skipped in the middle leaves you reassigning a combination that is still owned by the system, which looks like a Maccy bug.

Also expect the conflict list to be longer than it appears. Keyboard Shortcuts holds nested categories including Services, so a combination you have never assigned by hand can already be taken by a system feature you did not know was enabled.

Shortcuts that type a character fail inside password fields

One FAQ entry covers a failure with no in-app fix. If the shortcut produces a character, the example being OPTION and C producing a character like ç, macOS security may block it in password fields. The suggestion is to use Karabiner-Elements, a separate utility, to work around it.

Read that as a rule about which shortcuts to pick rather than a bug. Any combination of your three-modifier paste shortcuts that also emits a character on the keyboard can be blocked exactly where pasting is most useful, inside a password or secure field.

So when you choose your combinations from the usage list, prefer ones that do not type a character on the current keyboard layout, and if you have already hit this, change the shortcut in Maccy settings rather than hunting for a Maccy bug that does not exist.

Editorial conclusion

Maccy suits someone who copies constantly and wants history without a window in the way. Before you install, get it from maccy.app, the GitHub releases page, or brew, because named lookalike domains distribute malware. After installing, grant Accessibility before blaming the app for not pasting, and add com.apple.is-remote-clipboard to the ignore list if you copy from an iPhone on purpose and do not want it mirrored into history.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. License: MIT
2. p0deje/Maccy on GitHub
3. Project website
4. README
5. Releases