Search your clipboard history by keyword on Mac

You copied a chunk of text two days ago and you can almost remember what was in it — a phrase, a name, part of a URL. Scrolling back through hundreds of clipboard items hoping to spot it is hopeless. You need to search.

Two paths

Native macOS. There’s no clipboard history to search. The Finder’s “Show Clipboard” only shows the latest item. Spotlight indexes files but doesn’t see clipboard contents. If macOS is your only tool, you simply can’t go looking for something you copied last week.

Perch. The clipboard history is fully searchable — type a word, a URL fragment, a snippet of code, and the list filters live to matching items.

Search your history

1. Open Perch with ⌘⇧V.
2. Start typing. The search field is focused by default, so your keystrokes go straight into the query.
3. The list filters as you type — match on any text the item contains.
4. Arrow down to the item you want and press ↩ to paste it.

Search matches against the full text of clipboard items, including links, file paths, and code snippets. For images, you can search by source app — say, “Safari” to find a screenshot you saved while browsing.

Narrow with filters

If a plain keyword brings back too many results, add a filter. After opening Perch, click the filter icon (or press ⌘F) to filter by:

• Type — text, image, link, file, colour.
• Source app — only items copied from Safari, VS Code, Slack, etc.
• Pinned — only show pinned snippets.
• Collection — restrict to a specific collection you’ve set up.

Filters stack with keyword search, so “vite” + Type: Link + Source: Safari finds exactly the link you copied out of a tab last Tuesday.

When you can’t find something

A few things to check if a known copy doesn’t appear in search:

• It might be older than your history retention window (default 90 days, set in Settings → General).
• The source app might be on your excluded list — Perch ignores anything copied from there.
• If you searched a fragment of a URL, try searching the domain instead — URLs often have noisy query strings.

Searchable history is the single biggest reason a clipboard manager pays for itself. Once you’ve gone looking for something you copied a week ago and found it in three seconds, it’s hard to go back.