Links
Anything that parses as a URL. Useful when you've half-remembered "I copied that article yesterday" — filter to Links, type a word from the title.
Perch is a quiet, fast clipboard manager for macOS — it watches your clipboard, keeps everything you've copied, and lets you find any of it again in a keystroke. This guide walks through how Perch captures, how to find things again, how the keyboard shortcuts work, and every option in Settings.
Perch lives in your menubar and watches the system pasteboard. Every time
you hit ⌘C in any app — text, a screenshot, a file in Finder,
a swatch from a colour picker — Perch grabs a copy and tucks it into your
history. You don't have to do anything; the app you copied from doesn't
need to know Perch exists.
Capture happens by polling the pasteboard a couple of times a second. It's how every macOS clipboard manager works — there's no event the system fires when you copy something, just a counter that ticks up. Perch checks that counter on a quiet timer and, when it changes, reads whatever the new contents are.
Two situations cause Perch to skip a copy on purpose: when Perch itself is the frontmost app (so re-pasting from history doesn't create a duplicate), and when the frontmost app is on your ignored list. Everything else is fair game.
Perch reads the pasteboard in priority order and stores the highest-fidelity type it finds:
Some apps put private pasteboard types alongside the regular ones — Figma copies layers, Sketch copies styles, Numbers copies cell formulas. Perch can capture those too, but it's off by default because it makes each clip bigger on disk.
Flip on Capture application-specific data in Settings → General and Perch will snapshot every pasteboard type the source app wrote. Pasting back into that same app then works natively — Figma layers paste as Figma layers, not as text. Clips that contain only private types show up as "Application Specific Data" in your history.
Text is capped at 100 KB per clip — if you copy a giant log file or a whole novel, the first 100 KB is kept and the rest is dropped. Images are capped at 10 MB. These limits exist so a single huge paste can't bloat your history into a slow, unmanageable thing.
Perch also dedupes — if the new clip matches the most-recent clip of the
same type (compared by first 500 chars + length), it's silently ignored.
Hammering ⌘C on the same selection three times won't fill
your history with three identical rows.
How long Perch keeps history is up to you — the default is 3 months, but the slider in General settings runs from 24 hours all the way to "forever". Pinned items and anything in a collection never expire, regardless of the retention setting.
Perch has two ways of showing your clipboard history. Both are equally capable — pick whichever feels less in the way.
The overlay panel — search at the top, smart filters below it, and your clipboard history as a scrollable list.
The default global hotkey is ⌘⇧V — Cmd + Shift + V. Press it
from anywhere on your Mac and Perch's panel appears, focused, ready for
arrow keys or typing. Press it again to dismiss.
The hotkey is registered through Carbon's RegisterEventHotKey
API — the only reliable way for a menubar app to claim a system-wide
shortcut. You can rebind it under Settings → General → Global Hotkey: click
the chord, press your new combination, done. At least one of Cmd, Control,
or Option is required (Shift alone won't do).
Turn the hotkey off entirely if you'd rather only open Perch from the menu bar.
Click the Perch icon in your menu bar and a popover drops down beneath it — classic macOS, like the Wi-Fi or volume menus. The popover is transient: click anywhere outside and it closes. Best when you're already mousing around and don't want to reach for the keyboard.
The other option — and the default — is the overlay. A full-height panel slides in from the side of your screen, sits above whatever you were doing, and slides back out when you dismiss it. It's a lot of screen real estate so the list, previews, and command bar all have room to breathe.
Choose left or right edge in Settings → Appearance, and pick the animation — Slide (the default) or Fade. The slide animation translates the content layer inside a clipped window so it stays glued to one screen and never flashes onto an adjacent monitor.
Whichever mode you pick, Perch remembers which app you came from and hands focus back to it on dismiss. So ⌘⇧V → arrow down → ↩ in your text editor lands the paste exactly where your cursor was.
The fastest way to find a clip is to start typing. The search field sits at the top of the panel and filters the list as you go — it matches against text content, source-app name, and the URL/filename for links and files.
Arrow keys move the selection through filtered results. ↩
copies the highlighted clip back to the clipboard and dismisses the panel,
restoring focus to the previous app so you can paste straight in.
Esc clears the search if there's text in it, or closes the
panel if there isn't.
The filter bar above the list also lets you narrow by collection — All, then any smart collection that has items, then your own collections. Tab and Shift+Tab cycle through them without taking your hands off the keyboard.
History is great for "the thing I just copied," but Perch also has two ways to keep specific clips around indefinitely — pins, for one-off anchors, and collections, for groups of related clips.
Smart collections sit above your own — both show a live count and survive Clear All.
Pin any clip and it sticks. Pinned clips don't expire when your retention window passes, and they survive a Clear All. Useful for a wallet address you paste once a week, your home Wi-Fi password, the boilerplate intro to every cold email you send.
Perch ships with three smart collections that fill themselves automatically:
Anything that parses as a URL. Useful when you've half-remembered "I copied that article yesterday" — filter to Links, type a word from the title.
PNG/TIFF clips plus file URLs ending in image extensions (jpg, png, heic, webp, gif, svg, and friends).
A third smart collection, Documents, gathers file URLs ending in office-document extensions — PDF, DOCX, XLSX, Keynote, Pages, Numbers, RTF, CSV. Smart collections appear in the filter bar only when they actually contain items, so an empty Mac doesn't show a row of empty filters. Turn any of them off in Settings → Collections if you'd rather not see them.
Create your own collections to group related clips. Naming a collection "Snippets" and dropping your most-used SQL queries and code blocks into it means they're one filter away from a paste at any time. Same for "Bills", "Drafts", "Onboarding emails" — whatever taxonomy fits your week.
Add a collection from Settings → Collections, or use ⌘⇧N with
the panel open. Move a clip in via the Command Bar —
every collection you've made shows up at the bottom of it. Items in a
collection are kept forever — same as pinned items — and survive Clear
All.
Hit ⌘↩ or ⌘⇧C on a selected clip and the
Command Bar opens — a small contextual menu of things Perch can do with
that clip beyond a plain paste. The menu reads the clip's contents and
offers only what makes sense for it; text clips show text transforms, URL
clips show URL actions, files show file actions.
The Command Bar — contextual to the clip. Arrow keys move, Return runs the action.
Every text clip can be re-copied as UPPERCASE, lowercase, or Title Case. Rich-text clips get a "Copy as Plain Text" action that strips all the formatting — handy when you've copied something out of a styled web page and want it to land as bare text without bringing the source site's fonts and colours along for the ride.
Clips that look like code (indented blocks, common keywords) get two more options: Strip Indentation drops leading whitespace from every line, and Wrap in Code Block surrounds the text with triple-backticks for pasting into Markdown.
When the clip is a URL the Command Bar swaps in:
[domain](url), ready to paste into a Markdown doc.For file clips, the Command Bar offers Copy File Path (the full POSIX path), Copy File Name (just the filename), and Reveal in Finder. Reveal pops Finder open and selects the file in its parent folder — the same as Cmd-clicking a title bar.
At the bottom of the Command Bar, every collection you've created shows up as a destination. Picking one moves the current clip into that collection — Perch keeps the original in history too so you don't lose it. If the clip is already in a collection, a "Remove from Collection" option appears at the top of that list.
The Command Bar is keyboard-first. Arrow keys move through the list, ↩ runs the highlighted action, Esc closes the menu and leaves you back on the clip. You never need to reach for the trackpad.
Some apps you never want Perch to look at — your password manager, your banking app, a notes app that holds private journal entries. The Ignored Apps list under Settings → Privacy fixes that. Anything copied while one of those apps is frontmost is invisible to Perch — no capture, no row, no file written.
Add an app by clicking Add App and picking it from the
file picker that opens. Perch stores the bundle ID (e.g.
com.1password.1password7) so the rule survives renames or
version bumps. Remove an entry with the × next to its name.
Common candidates: 1Password, Bitwarden, your bank's Mac app, anything where "the next paste might leak" is a real worry. Perch doesn't ship with a preset list — the choice is yours, and there's no telemetry on what you pick.
Your clipboard history is sensitive — every URL you ever clicked, every snippet you ever copied. Perch is built so all of that stays on your Mac, end of story.
~/Library/Application Support/Perch/. history.json for clip metadata, collections.json for your collections, and an images/ directory for captured screenshots.The capture rules described under Ignored apps are your other line of defence: anything copied from an ignored app is never written to disk in the first place.
If you're worried about copies you've already made, Clear All takes about half a second and wipes the lot. Pinned items and collections stay — by design, so you don't lose a carefully curated set of snippets to a single misclick.
Perch is built so you almost never need the mouse once the panel is open.
Here's the full set — also available from inside the app with ⌘?.
Quick Look (Space) is worth a special mention — it pops up a
full-size preview of the highlighted clip without leaving the list. For
images you get the image; for text you get the whole thing in a scrollable
view. ⌘C or ⌘↩ from inside Quick Look copies and
dismisses both Quick Look and the panel in one go.
Open Settings with ⌘, or from the menubar icon. The sidebar
is grouped — preferences at the top, then licensing, then About. Here's
every option and what it does.
⌘⇧V.The Ignored Apps list — see Ignored apps above. Apps you add here never have their copies captured.
Direct-download Perch updates itself in place. The Updates tab shows the current version, lets you toggle automatic checks, and offers a manual "Check now". App Store builds get updates through the App Store instead and don't show this tab.
Where you activate, manage, or deactivate your licence key. See the next section for what happens before you have one. The License tab is hidden in App Store builds (the App Store handles purchase).
Perch has a 24-hour free trial — the full app, no feature gates, no watermark. Start it from the welcome screen and you've got a day to live with it and see if it fits. The trial timer counts down in real time and shows up in Settings → License.
Past 24 hours, you'll need a licence to keep using Perch. One licence is $19.99 — bought once, yours forever on this Mac, no subscription. Or pick up Unlimited and you get Perch plus every other General Software app for one monthly fee.
The licence validates online occasionally — every 6 hours while you're using Perch, and once on launch if you've got a key. If your Mac's offline for up to 7 days, Perch keeps working as normal; past that grace window it'll ask you to reconnect so it can re-check the key. That's the only network traffic from a paid Perch.
A handful of reasons, in order of likeliness: the source app is on your Ignored list; the clip was a private pasteboard type Perch can't read (turn on Capture application-specific data in General settings); the copy was bigger than 100 KB of text or 10 MB of image; or you copied identical content twice in a row and Perch deduped the second one.
No — deletes are permanent. Perch doesn't keep a trash. If you want a clip to stick around, pin it or move it to a collection; both are immune to Clear All and to retention expiry.
With the default 3-month retention and average-size text clips, expect a few MB to a few tens of MB. Image-heavy use grows faster — each captured screenshot can be a megabyte or two. If you set retention to Forever Perch warns you in-app: the slider turns orange and reminds you that "unlimited history may use significant disk space over time."
Text above 100 KB is truncated to the first 100 KB. RTF data above 200 KB is dropped (you keep the plain-text version). Images above ~10 MB are skipped entirely — Perch refuses to capture them. None of these will hang or stutter the app; the cap just kicks in quietly.
No — by design. Clipboard contents are some of the most sensitive data on your machine, and a sync server would mean a copy of it sitting somewhere we don't control. Perch is local-only, and that's the contract.
Open Settings → General and check the Global Hotkey section. If you recently recorded a new chord while the app was in an odd state, the key may have failed to re-register. Toggling the "Enable global hotkey" switch off and back on re-registers cleanly.
Not from within Perch. If you need to, the underlying file is plain JSON
at ~/Library/Application Support/Perch/history.json — open it
in any text editor and the structure is straightforward. Images sit next
to it in images/.
That's everything Perch does.