All
Everything, ranked by relevance and recency. Default. Use ⌘1.
Fresh is your Mac's short-term memory — desktop, Downloads, screenshots, and clipboard, all one keystroke away. This guide covers every panel, every shortcut, and how to make Fresh feel invisible.
Fresh has no Dock icon and no main window in the usual sense. It lives in the background and waits for you. There are two ways to bring it up — the global hotkey, and the small leaf icon in your menubar. Both open the same panel, in the same place, with the same content.
The panel — one search, four scoped tabs, results from every source ranked together.
Press ⌥⌘Space from anywhere — Mail, Safari, Xcode, full-screen Keynote — and Fresh slides in over the top, centred on your active display. Press it again, or hit Esc, and it slips away. There's no animation tax: open and close are instant.
The default is ⌥⌘Space on purpose — it matches the muscle memory you've already built for Spotlight, Alfred, and Raycast. If you use one of those, you've probably already remapped Spotlight to ⌘Space alone, leaving the option-flavoured version free for Fresh. If not, change the shortcut in Settings → Shortcut.
The hotkey works everywhere — even on top of full-screen apps, in Mission Control, or while another app is "captured" (games, recording software). The panel joins all Spaces and floats above full-screen windows.
Up in your menubar — left of the clock, near Wi-Fi and battery — Fresh shows a small leaf. Click it for a compact popover with the same things the panel has, in miniature: your Pocket, recent files, any cleanup suggestions, and a footer with Open / Settings / Quit.
The menubar is handy when you only need to glance at what's new without taking over the screen. For real work — searching, dragging, batch tidy — open the panel instead.
On the first run Fresh walks you through a brief welcome: it asks for the handful of folder permissions it needs (Desktop, Downloads, Screenshots, and your clipboard), confirms the hotkey, and offers to launch at login. Launch-at-login defaults to on — Fresh is most useful when it's always there, so it's set up that way by default. You can flip it off in General any time.
If you click through too fast, you can re-run the welcome flow from Settings → About → Show welcome. Useful for re-granting a permission you accidentally denied.
Fresh treats your Desktop the way you actually think about it: a scratchpad. Files that land there are usually in transit — you saved them so you could come back later, not so they could live on your Desktop forever. Fresh keeps an eye on the folder so you don't have to.
Four sources, one panel. Fresh watches each folder live and the clipboard in the background.
Open the panel and the Desktop section lists every file currently on your Desktop, newest first, with a thumbnail, name, age, and size. Click a row to select it; hit Space to peek with Quick Look; press ↩ to open in its default app.
Fresh re-reads the folder live — drop a file on the Desktop with the panel open and it appears at the top within a second. Drop a folder and it appears as a folder row; Fresh doesn't drill into subdirectories, it treats them as opaque items just like Finder does.
Once you've tidied your Desktop manually a couple of times, Fresh offers
to do it for you. Turn on auto-tidy in Settings →
Watching and Fresh will, after a delay you set (default 15
minutes), quietly move new Desktop files into a
Desktop/Fresh folder. They're not deleted; they're not
hidden; they're one click away in Finder. You just stop having to look
at them.
The delay matters — it gives you a window to do whatever you actually dragged the file to your Desktop for (drag it into Mail, attach it to a Slack message, open it in Preview) before Fresh files it away. If you use the file in that window, the auto-tidy timer cancels for it.
Auto-tidy never deletes anything. It moves files into a subfolder you can browse in Finder, and every move is undoable from inside the panel with ⌘Z. The first time Fresh tidies for you it asks before doing it; after that, it's confident enough to keep going.
Your Downloads folder is where dozens of files quietly pile up: that installer DMG you used once, the PDF a coworker sent, six different versions of an invoice. Fresh surfaces it so you can find what's actually new and quietly clear out what isn't.
Every file in ~/Downloads, newest first, with the same row
shape as the Desktop section — thumbnail, name, age, size. The list
updates the instant your browser, Mail, or Messages finishes a download;
you can drag the file straight out of Fresh into another app the moment
it arrives.
Once a file in Downloads has been sitting around for a while, Fresh
starts to suggest you tidy it. The default threshold is 14
days — adjust it in Settings → Watching. Suggestions appear as
a row at the top of the panel ("Move 7 files older than 14 days into
Downloads/Old?"); click it for the full list, confirm to
move, hit ⌘Z to undo.
Installers (DMG, PKG, ZIP) get a faster threshold than documents because they're usually one-shot — once you've installed the thing, the disk image is dead weight. Per-kind thresholds are managed for you, but you can override them per source in the same Settings tab.
macOS dumps every screenshot you take onto your Desktop by default. Most of them are one-shot — paste it into a Slack message, then forget it exists. Fresh keeps an index of them so the ones you took 20 minutes ago are easy to find, and the ones from three weeks ago aren't cluttering your eye.
Screenshots are detected by name pattern (the
Screen Shot YYYY-MM-DD at H.MM.SS form) and treated as their
own group regardless of where they're saved. If you've configured macOS
to dump screenshots somewhere other than the Desktop, Fresh picks them
up from there.
The default suggestion threshold for screenshots is 7 days — faster than other downloads, because screenshots age out of usefulness faster than nearly any other file you create. Adjust it in Settings → Watching.
Type into the search field and Fresh matches not just by filename, but
by the text inside your screenshots. macOS's on-device text
recognition extracts what's visible — a button label, an error message,
a URL — and indexes it locally. So you can search "Stripe" and find the
screenshot where Stripe's dashboard happened to be on screen, even
though the filename is just Screen Shot ....
OCR runs entirely on your Mac with Apple's Vision framework — no screenshot ever leaves your machine. The index lives in Fresh's application support folder and is wiped when you uninstall the app.
Every Mac has exactly one clipboard, and overwriting it is one of the most common ways to lose work — copy a URL, copy a second URL, the first is gone forever. Fresh fixes that by keeping a rolling history of everything you've copied: text, links, images, files.
The Copies tab in the panel lists your recent clipboard entries, newest first. Each row shows a snippet (or thumbnail), the source app, and how long ago you copied it. Click to bring it back to the clipboard; press ↩ to paste it into whichever app was frontmost before Fresh opened.
Sensitive copies — anything macOS marks as transient (password manager autofills, OTP codes) — are skipped automatically. Everything else sticks around as long as you have room for it.
By default, recent copies also appear in the unified All view at the top of the panel, interleaved with files. So you don't have to switch tabs to grab the link you copied a minute ago — it's right there with the screenshot you took right after.
If that's too noisy for you, flip Show recent copies in the unified Recent list off in Settings → Watching. Copies will still be tracked and findable under the Copies tab; they just won't bleed into the main feed.
Everything in Fresh is interactive — files are real file URLs, copies are real clipboard payloads, screenshots are real images. You can do anything to a Fresh row that you'd do to it in Finder or your editor.
Click and hold any file row, drag, and drop into another app: Mail
composer for an attachment, Slack for an upload, Finder to move it,
Photoshop to open it. The drag is a real NSItemProvider —
apps get the real file path, not a placeholder, so the receiving app
treats it exactly as if you'd dragged from Finder.
Multi-select is supported — ⌘-click or ⇧-click to add rows, then drag the whole batch out at once.
Select a clipboard row and press ↩. Fresh writes it back to the system clipboard and dismisses the panel — your previous frontmost app comes back into focus, you press ⌘V, and the content lands. The whole motion takes about a second.
For image and file copies the same is true — they're written back as the appropriate clipboard type so the receiving app gets a real image or a real file reference, not a string of bytes pretending to be one.
Every row supports the standard set of file actions:
At the top of the panel there's a strip called Pocket. Drop files into it — from Fresh itself, from Finder, from anywhere — and they stay pinned. The Pocket is where you stash a file you're using right now but don't want to lose track of: a slide deck for a meeting, a CSV you're cross-referencing, an image you're emailing to three people in sequence.
The Pocket — drag the handle to reorder, drag the icon to drop the file into another app.
The Pocket persists across launches. Files are referenced by URL, not copied — moving the file in Finder updates the reference. Drag a Pocket file out the same way you'd drag any other row.
The Pocket also shows up in the menubar popover — so even when the panel isn't open, you're one click away from your pinned files. Handy for files you need across a long meeting where you're not sitting at the keyboard the whole time.
The text field at the top of the panel is always focused when Fresh opens. Start typing and the entire list filters live across every panel at once — Desktop, Downloads, Screenshots, and the clipboard history, all matched against the same query.
Matching is forgiving — it covers filenames, the text inside screenshots, the text content of clipboard entries, and the source app a copy came from. So you can search "Stripe" and find a downloaded invoice PDF, a screenshot of a dashboard, and a link you copied from their docs — all in one ranked list.
Four tabs along the top let you scope the results:
Everything, ranked by relevance and recency. Default. Use ⌘1.
Only file rows — Desktop, Downloads, Screenshots. Skips the clipboard. ⌘2.
Only clipboard history. Useful when you remember copying something but don't want files in the way. ⌘3.
Only your pinned items. The smallest list, always the most relevant. ⌘4.
Cycle between tabs with ⌘[ and ⌘]. Esc with text in the field clears the search; Esc a second time dismisses the panel.
Settings lives inside the panel — there's no separate Settings window. Open it with ⌘, or via the menubar's Settings button. A sidebar on the left lists seven sections; pick one and the detail pane fills the right side.
Hit Esc or click the Done button in the top left to return to the panel.
SMAppService so Fresh comes up cleanly when you log in, no LaunchAgent hacks.Toggle each source on or off. By default Fresh watches all four — turn off the ones you don't want surfaced.
~/Desktop. Default on.~/Downloads. Default on.Auto-tidy.
Desktop/Fresh after the wait.Suggestion thresholds.
Change the global hotkey. Five presets are offered — ⌥⌘Space, ⌃⌘Space, ⇧⌘F, ⌥⌘F, ⌃⌥⌘F — covering the combinations that don't collide with default macOS shortcuts. The current shortcut is shown in a chip at the top of the tab. A Reset to ⌥⌘ Space button takes you back to the default in one click.
If you pick a shortcut that's already claimed by another app — Spotlight, Raycast, an OS-level Mission Control binding — Fresh's hotkey won't fire. Pick a different preset, or change the other app's binding.
Files you've told Fresh never to suggest again — by hitting "Don't suggest this" on a cleanup suggestion, or by individually skipping a file in the wizard. The Ignored tab lists everything you've banished; remove a path from the list to bring it back into suggestions and auto-tidy.
A Clear all button at the bottom resets the list in one move. Files that no longer exist on disk render with a dashed question mark so it's obvious they can be safely removed.
A read-only dashboard of what Fresh has done for you: files tidied, bytes saved, days you've used the app, time saved (an estimate based on how long it'd take you to do this by hand). Nothing here is sent anywhere — it's a private mirror of your own usage.
Outside the Mac App Store, Fresh updates itself with Sparkle. The Updates tab shows the date of the last check, lets you toggle automatic checks and downloads independently, and gives you a manual Check for Updates button. Both auto-toggles default to on.
Inside the Mac App Store build (if you got Fresh through the App Store), this tab simply notes that updates come through the App Store itself.
The big-icon "Hello, this is Fresh" page. Version and build number, a link to the website, a Show welcome button to replay the first-run flow, and a couple of share tiles for telling a friend.
Fresh is the flagship — it's free, with no trial limit, no nag screen, no watermark, no upsell baked into the panel. If you only ever use Fresh, you've cost us nothing and you owe us nothing.
It's free because it's also a doorway. Once Fresh is part of your day, you'll notice the other small Mac apps we make sitting next to it: Melt for shrinking images, Perch for keeping a window pinned, Scratch for a fast everywhere notepad, and more. Those are the paid ones — buy any of them once for a few dollars, or pick up Unlimited and get every General Software app for one monthly fee.
No part of Fresh nudges you toward an upgrade. The only thing it asks of you is that, when you find it useful, you tell a friend.
Your data never leaves the Mac. The screenshot OCR index, the clipboard history, the Pocket, the stats — all of it lives in Fresh's local application support folder and is wiped when you uninstall the app. No cloud account, no telemetry beyond anonymous product analytics you can disable.
That's the whole tour.