Holt

Your clipboard, kept.
Clipboard history for macOS, synced between your Macs. Free and open source.

What it does

• Find anything you copied. Press ⇧⌘V and start typing. Every word has to match, so ssh 10.0 finds that one command from last week.
• Paste where you were. Pick a clip and press return. Holt pastes it into the app you were typing in. Or drag a clip out of the list into any field.
• Images too. Screenshots and copied pictures, up to 10 MB each. The text in them is read on your Mac, so invoice 2026 finds the screenshot of the invoice.
• Pin what you reuse. Pinned clips stay at the top and never expire.
• On every Mac. Pair your Macs once. Copy on one, press ⌘V on the other a second later.
• Private. No account and no Holt server. Copies that password managers mark as private are never recorded.

Compared to

	Holt	Universal Clipboard	Maccy	Paste
History and search	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
Sync between Macs	Yes, over any network	Last copy only, devices nearby	No	Yes, through iCloud
iPhone	Beta	Yes	No	Yes
Open source	Yes	No	Yes	No
Price	Free	Free	Free	Subscription

Install

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

brew install --cask snowztech/tap/holt

It needs macOS 14 or later on Apple Silicon. Releases are signed and notarized, so macOS opens Holt without warnings, and Holt updates itself from the menu bar menu.

Holt for iPhone is in beta: join it on TestFlight.

To build from source instead, you need Xcode and Rust (rustup.rs):

git clone https://github.com/snowztech/holt
cd holt
make run

On first launch, a short checklist walks you through setup:

• 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. Accessibility access lets Holt paste into the app you're in. Without it, Holt copies the clip and you press ⌘V.
• Open at login. Recommended, so Holt never misses a copy after a restart.

Docs

holt.snowztech.com/docs covers everything Holt does: search and paste, pins, images, sync, Raycast and Alfred, settings, keyboard shortcuts and troubleshooting.

Sync between Macs

Open Settings → Devices in Holt on both Macs. Each one shows a 6-digit code and lists the other under Nearby. On one Mac, pick the other and type the code it shows.

After that the Macs stay connected, and Holt never uses Bluetooth:

• Same Wi-Fi. They talk directly over your local network.
• Different networks. They connect directly over the internet.
• A router in the way. A relay passes the data along. Sync is end-to-end encrypted, so the relay only sees bytes it can't read.

Copies, pins and deletes all sync. A clip copied on another Mac in the last 2 minutes goes straight onto this Mac's clipboard, and a small notice says where it came from.

Under the hood, the connection is iroh. The pairing code is checked with SPAKE2, so someone on the same network gets one guess per try, and pairing stops after 5 wrong codes. How Holt works walks through the whole flow.

Privacy

• Your history stays on your Macs, in ~/Library/Application Support/Holt/holt.db, with images next to it in images/. There's no Holt account and no analytics. Text in images is read on your Mac with Apple's recognizer, never sent anywhere.
• Copies that password managers mark as private are never recorded. In Settings → History you can add apps whose copies Holt ignores.
• Sync is end-to-end encrypted, and only Macs you paired can connect.
• To find each other across networks, your Macs use iroh's public discovery and relay servers. Those see your Macs' network addresses, never your clips.

Meet Skip

A holt is an otter's den, where it keeps what matters. Sea otters even carry a favorite stone tucked under their arm, everywhere they go.

Skip does the same with what you copy: keeps it safe, and skips it across to your other Mac. Skip's face is the icon in your menu bar.

Roadmap

• Clipboard history on the Mac
• Sync between Macs
• Signed download and Homebrew
• iPhone app, in beta on TestFlight
• Images, and search for the text inside screenshots
• Windows and Linux

Contributing

Bug reports, ideas and pull requests are welcome. CONTRIBUTING.md explains how the code fits together, how to work on the UI, and the checks CI runs.

License

MIT. Made by snowztech.