Holt docs

Get started

Download Holt, open the disk image and drag Holt to Applications. Or with Homebrew:

Holt needs macOS 14 or later on an Apple Silicon Mac.

First launch

A short checklist asks for what Holt needs:

• See what you copy. Required. Set Holt to Always Allow in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Paste from Other Apps. Without it, macOS asks on every copy.
• Paste for you. Optional. With Accessibility access, Holt pastes into the app you're in. Without it, Holt puts the clip on your clipboard and you press ⌘V.
• Open at login. Recommended, so Holt doesn't miss copies after a restart.

Holt lives in the menu bar as Skip's face. It doesn't have a Dock icon.

On iPhone? Holt for iPhone is in beta.

Updates

Holt checks for new versions by itself. When one is out, the menu bar menu shows Update to Holt. You can also pick Check for Updates in the same menu. With Homebrew, brew upgrade works too.

Find and paste

Press ⇧⌘V anywhere. The popup opens with your newest clips first and the search field ready.

Search

Type any words from the clip, in any order. Every word has to match somewhere, and case doesn't matter, so ssh 10.0 finds that one command from last week. Pinned clips come first, then the newest.

Paste

Move with ↑ ↓ and press ↩. Holt pastes the clip into the app you were typing in. The popup never takes focus away from that app, so the paste lands where your cursor was.

Hold ⌘ to see numbers next to the first nine clips, and press ⌘1 to ⌘9 to paste one directly. Double-clicking a clip pastes it too.

A clip you paste moves back to the top, and keeps the app it was first copied from.

Preview

The right side shows the selected clip in full: where it was copied, when, and on which Mac. Links show as a card. Press ⌘O to open a link in your browser.

Drag out

Drag any clip out of the list and drop it into another app, like a text field, a Mail message or a Finder window.

Where a clip came from

Press ⌘I to see when and where the selected clip was copied, and how it got to this Mac. What it shows is explained below.

Delete

⌘⌫ deletes the selected clip, here and on your paired Macs.

Menu bar menu

Click Skip in the menu bar for your 5 most recent clips. Clicking one copies it, so you can paste it with ⌘V. You can also drag a clip out of the menu into any app.

The menu also shows whether your Macs are connected, and has Open Holt, Settings and Check for Updates. If Holt can't read the clipboard, it shows Allow Clipboard Access at the top.

Pins

Press ⌘P on a clip to pin it. Pinned clips stay at the top of the list, never expire, and survive Clear History. Use them for things you paste every day: an address, a signature, a command. Press ⌘P again to unpin.

Images

Screenshots and pictures you copy are kept too, up to 10 MB each, and so are image files you copy in Finder. PNG, JPEG and HEIC images are kept as they are, and other formats are saved as PNG.

Holt reads the text in each image on your Mac, with Apple's text recognizer. Search finds it, so invoice 2026 finds the screenshot of the invoice, and the preview shows the lines that matched. Nothing is sent anywhere.

• See it full size. Select an image and press space. Press it again or esc to close. In the popup this works while the search field is empty, so you can still type a space in a search.
• In the menu bar menu. Highlight an image and press space. This needs Accessibility access.
• Open it. ⌘O opens the image in Preview. Holt's copy is read-only, so it stays as you copied it. Duplicate it in Preview to edit.
• Paste it. ↩ pastes the image itself, and dragging it out drops the file.

Images sync to your other Macs once they run Holt 0.1.4 or later. To stop keeping images, turn off Record images in Settings → History. Raycast and Alfred don't show images yet.

Sync between Macs

Pair your Macs once. After that, copies, pins and deletes show up on every Mac.

Pair two Macs

1. Open Holt Settings → Devices on both Macs. They need to be on the same network for this step.
2. Each Mac shows a 6-digit code and lists the other under Nearby.
3. On one Mac, click Pair next to the other Mac and type the code the other Mac shows.

Your Macs stay paired from then on, on any network. To stop syncing with one, click Remove next to it in Settings → Devices.

The QR code in that tab pairs Holt for iPhone.

Copy here, paste there

A clip you copied on another Mac in the last 2 minutes goes straight onto this Mac's clipboard, so you can press ⌘V right away. A small notice says which Mac it came from. You can turn the notice off in Settings → General.

How it connects

• Same Wi-Fi. Your Macs talk directly over your local network.
• Different networks. They connect directly over the internet.
• A router in the way. An encrypted relay passes the data along. It can't read it and doesn't store it.

Sync is end-to-end encrypted and never uses Bluetooth. Only Macs you paired can connect. ⌘I on a clip shows which way it came: same network, over the internet or via relay.

iPhone beta

Holt for iPhone is in beta. Join it on TestFlight, which also keeps it up to date. It needs iOS 17 or later, and Holt on your Mac.

Pair it with your Mac

1. On your Mac, open Holt Settings → Devices.
2. On your iPhone, open Holt, tap Pair with your Mac and scan the QR code. Pointing the Camera app at it works too.
3. Without a camera, pick your Mac under Nearby Macs and type the code it shows. For this, both need to be on the same network.

After that, your iPhone and your Macs sync the same ways your Macs do with each other: on the same Wi-Fi, across the internet, or through a relay.

From your Mac to your iPhone

Everything you copy on your Mac shows up in Holt on your iPhone. Tap a clip to copy it, then paste it anywhere. iOS doesn't let apps change the clipboard in the background, so the clip waits in Holt until you tap it.

From your iPhone to your Mac

iOS doesn't let apps read your clipboard in the background either, so nothing leaves your iPhone until you send it. Copy something, then use one of these:

• Back Tap. Settings → Accessibility → Touch → Back Tap → Double Tap → Send Clipboard to Holt. Then a double tap on the back of your iPhone sends what you copied.
• Action Button. On iPhones that have one: Settings → Action Button → Shortcut → Send Clipboard to Holt.
• Control Center. On iOS 18 or later: open Control Center, tap +, and add Send Clipboard to Holt.
• Share sheet. Select text or a link in any app, tap Share, then Holt.
• Siri. Say "Send clipboard to Holt".
• Holt itself. When you open Holt after copying something new, it offers to send it.

Holt → Settings → Send faster has the same list. To stop iOS asking every time Holt reads what you copied, set Paste from Other Apps to Allow in Settings → Holt.

Universal Clipboard

Apple's Universal Clipboard keeps working next to Holt. Copy on your iPhone, paste on a Mac nearby, and Holt keeps it in your history. It's the only way a copy leaves your iPhone on its own, and for now the only way images do: Holt for iPhone sends text and links. Press ⌘I on a clip to see which way it came.

Where a clip came from

Select a clip in the popup and press ⌘I. A small panel under the preview shows where the clip was copied and how it got to this Mac. It stays open as you move through clips. Press ⌘I again to hide it.

Copied

When and where the clip was copied.

• 14:32:07 on this Mac in Safari. You copied it here, in that app.
• 14:32:07 on iPhone. It was copied on one of your paired devices, and Holt synced it here.
• 14:32:08, through Universal Clipboard. Apple's Universal Clipboard brought it from an iPhone, iPad or Mac signed in to your Apple Account. Holt only recorded it when it landed.

Arrived

One line each time Holt sync brought the clip from a paired device, like over the internet · 0.1 s later. A copy can arrive more than once, for example straight from your iPhone and again from another Mac.

The line says how it came:

• same network means it came straight from that device over the network you share, like your home Wi-Fi. It never left that network.
• over the internet means it came straight from that device, but you were on different networks, like your iPhone on mobile data and your Mac at home. It crossed the internet end-to-end encrypted, the way a video call does, with no server in between.
• via relay means the two devices couldn't reach each other, usually because a router or firewall was in the way. A relay server run by n0, the makers of iroh, passed the encrypted clip along. It can't read it and doesn't keep it. A relay is a little slower, but it works on any network.

Then how long after the copy it got here, like 0.1 s later. It compares two devices' clocks, so take it as approximate.

When the clip came through another device than the one it was copied on, the line starts with that device, like from MacBook Pro · same network. Hover over a line for the exact time it arrived and the address it came from: the other device's IP address, or the relay server's name.

When devices reconnect, they often start through a relay for a moment while they find a direct path. So the first clip after a reconnect can show via relay, and the next ones same network or over the internet. A VPN, like Tailscale, shows as over the internet, though the connection is still direct.

No Arrived line means Holt sync didn't bring the clip: it was copied on this Mac, or it came through Universal Clipboard.

Raycast and Alfred

Both read the history Holt keeps on your Mac, so Holt needs to be installed. They use the same search: every word has to match, and pinned clips come first.

Raycast

Run Search Clipboard History from the Holt extension. ↩ pastes the clip, and the action panel can copy it instead or open a link. The extension is waiting for review in the Raycast Store. You can follow it on GitHub.

Alfred

This needs Alfred's Powerpack. Download the Holt workflow and open it to install. Type holt and what you're looking for. ↩ pastes the clip, and ⌘↩ copies it without pasting.

Settings

Open them from the menu bar menu, or press ⌘, while the menu or the popup is open.

General

• Appearance. System, Light or Dark.
• Open Holt with. Click the shortcut and press the keys you want instead of ⇧⌘V.
• Open Holt at login.
• Show clips arriving from other devices. The notice when a copy comes from another Mac.
• Permissions. Whether Holt can see what you copy and paste for you, with a button to fix each one.

History

• Keep clips for. 1 week, 1 month, 3 months or 1 year. Older clips are removed, except pinned ones. Holt also keeps at most 5,000 unpinned clips.
• Record images. On by default.
• Never record copies from. Add apps whose copies Holt should ignore.
• Clear History. Removes every unpinned clip, here and on your paired Macs.

Devices

Your paired Macs, whether each is connected, and the code to pair a new one. See Sync between Macs.

Keyboard shortcuts

Privacy

• Your history stays on your Macs, in ~/Library/Application Support/Holt. There's no Holt account, no Holt server and no analytics.
• Copies that password managers like 1Password and Bitwarden mark as private are never recorded.
• Text in images is read on your Mac and never leaves it.
• To find each other across networks, your Macs use iroh's discovery and relay servers. Those see your Macs' network addresses, never your clips.

The full privacy policy has the details.

Troubleshooting

Something else? Open an issue on GitHub.