PanoThe macOS clipboard manager
with a memory.
Pano keeps a searchable clipboard history on your Mac and pastes it back with the keyboard. Free, open source, and it never leaves your Mac. Not as a promise: the app ships without the network entitlement.
brew install --cask pano · soon
macOS 15.4 or later · MIT licence
Free, open source, local-only
Free. Actually free.
No subscription, no paid tier, no feature gates, no "pro" version later. The whole app, with the source in the repo.
Open source, MIT.
Read how it captures, what it stores, and how it pastes. Every design decision is written down as an ADR in the repo.
Nothing leaves your Mac.
No sync, no cloud, no account, no telemetry. One SQLite file in your Application Support folder, and that is the entire data model.
What it does
Clipboard history built for people who copy code all day.
Instant search over everything you ever copied.
Unlimited history backed by SQLite FTS5. Search stays under two milliseconds at a hundred thousand clips, and the syntax is small enough to learn in a minute.
type:code,type:image,type:colourapp:xcodeto see what you copied from Xcode>7d,<2h,pinned:
Transforms, right in the search field.
Type the name of a transform and the preview converts as you type. Press return to paste the converted value, or shift-return for the original.
jsonpretty-prints,b64decodes,jwtshows the claimsslug,url,cleanfor textmarkdownrenders and pastes as rich text
Copy a hex, paste a Tailwind class.
Colours are recognised on capture. The preview shows the swatch and every conversion at once; pick the one your codebase wants.
rgb(),hsl(), SwiftUIColor(red:green:blue:)- Nearest Tailwind class, marked when the match is inexact
A rail of source apps, because that is how you remember.
People remember what they were doing when they copied something, not when. One click on Xcode shows only what came from Xcode. Pinboards live below the rail for the things you paste every week.
- Per-app exclusions for password managers and the like
- Pin a clip so it never expires; drag it out as a file
Screenshots become text you can search and paste.
Copy a screenshot of an error and Pano reads the text out of it with on-device OCR. Search for a word from the image and the screenshot comes up; press shift-return to paste the text instead of the picture.
- OCR runs locally with Apple Vision; nothing is uploaded
- Syntax highlighting for Swift, JavaScript, Python, Java, SQL, shell, CSS, HTML, JSON, Markdown
Secrets are recognised and short-lived.
API keys, JWTs, card numbers and IBANs are detected on capture. They can be masked in the list, and they expire on the one-hour rule instead of the thirty-day one. Anything a password manager marks as concealed never enters the database at all.
Keyboard first
Hands stay on the keys.
The panel opens next to your cursor with the search field already focused. Every action has a key; the mouse is optional.
The hotkey is yours to change. Delete needs the modifier on purpose: a plain backspace only edits the query.
But macOS has this built in
Pano vs. the built-in macOS clipboard history
It does, for eight hours. Spotlight's clipboard history keeps eight hours by default and seven days at most. It is fine until you need the thing from last week, or the rich text it stripped, or a way to keep 1Password out of it.
| macOS clipboard history | Pano | |
|---|---|---|
| History | 8 hours by default, 7 days at most | Unlimited, with retention rules you set |
| Search | Plain text | Full text, filters by type, app, age; OCR text |
| Rich text and images | Stripped to text | Kept, previewed, pasted as-is or as plain |
| Pinning | No | Pins and pinboards |
| Per-app exclusions | No | Yes, plus concealed-type detection |
| Transforms | No | JSON, Base64, JWT, slug, URL, colours, Markdown |
| Price | Included | Free, MIT |
Privacy
Verifiable, not promised.
Pano is sandboxed and is built without the com.apple.security.network.client entitlement. macOS will not let it open a socket, so there is nothing to audit and nothing to trust.
Everything lives in one SQLite file in your Application Support folder. Delete the app and the folder, and Pano is gone. There is no account to close.
Read the privacy policy, all four sentences of it.
Permissions it asks for
macOS asks this for any app that reads the clipboard. Without it Pano cannot capture anything, so this one is required.
Used for exactly one thing: pressing ⌘V for you in the app you were in. Decline it and Pano still works; the clip is put on the clipboard and you press ⌘V yourself.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
What is a clipboard manager?
A clipboard manager keeps a history of everything you copy, so you can search it and paste any earlier item, not just the last one. Pano is one for macOS: it adds previews, transforms, pinning and per-app filtering, and stores the history only on your Mac.
Does it sync to my iPhone or another Mac?
No, and it will not. Sync means a server or iCloud, and either one turns "never leaves your Mac" into a promise instead of a fact. If you need your clipboard on your phone, Pano is not the tool.
What does it cost?
Nothing. There is no paid tier and no plan for one. The licence is MIT; the Pano name and icon are the only things excluded.
Where is my data?
~/Library/Containers/com.cancetin.pano/Data/Library/Application Support/Pano/pano.sqlite, plus a Blobs/ folder next to it for large images. It is a normal SQLite database; open it with any client.
How is it different from Maccy, Paste or Raycast?
Maccy is great and also free; Pano adds previews, transforms, a source-app rail and pinboards. Paste is a subscription with sync. Raycast's clipboard is part of a launcher. Pano does one job and stays local.
Which macOS versions?
macOS 15.4 or later. It is a native Swift app, AppKit and SwiftUI, not Electron.
Can I build it myself?
Yes. Clone the repo, open Pano.xcodeproj in Xcode 16 or later and run. The packages have their own tests: swift test in each.