Quick answer: Maccy keeps your recent clipboard history, and Craft is where your finished documents live. Together they let you collect snippets, links, and images from many sources, then paste them into a Craft document in any order. You can strip formatting when you need to and pin the text you reuse constantly. Maccy App is the short-term buffer, and Craft is the permanent home.
TL;DR
- Use Maccy to gather: copy five or six things in a row, then paste them in the order the document needs.
- Pin repeat text (meeting headers, status lines, signature blocks) instead of keeping it in a Craft template you have to open.
- Paste as plain text when a web page’s styling would clutter your Craft doc.
- Ignore your password manager so secrets never sit in history.
- Don’t treat Maccy as storage. Anything worth keeping belongs in Craft.
You’re writing a project brief in Craft. You need a quote from one article, a link from another, a figure from a spreadsheet, and last week’s meeting notes. The usual routine is to copy one, switch to Craft, paste, switch back, and repeat. Every round trip costs a few seconds and some of your train of thought. A clipboard history removes most of those trips.
What does Maccy actually add to Craft?
Craft is a block-based document editor for Mac, iOS, and the web, and it handles pasted content well. What it doesn’t have is a memory of what you copied from other apps. The macOS clipboard holds exactly one item, so each new copy overwrites the last one.
Maccy Mac is a free, open-source clipboard manager for macOS that lives in the menu bar and records what you copy. By default it opens with Shift + Cmd + C, and you can type to search the history. Its history stays on your Mac .
| Task | Craft alone | Craft + Maccy |
|---|---|---|
| Gathering several snippets from different apps | One copy-paste round trip per snippet | Copy all of them, then paste in sequence |
| Recovering something you copied 10 minutes ago | Gone | Search the history |
| Reusing a standard block of text | Open a template or another doc | Pin it and paste from anywhere |
| Dropping web text into a clean doc | Paste, then fix styling | Paste as plain text |
| Long-term storage and organization | Yes, this is Craft’s job | No, Maccy history is temporary |
How do you collect research and then paste it into Craft?
This is the workflow that pays off most. Instead of alternating between source and document, separate the two phases.
- Gather. Go through your sources and copy each thing you need: a sentence, a URL, a table cell, a screenshot. Don’t switch to Craft between copies.
- Open Craft. Start (or reopen) your document.
- Place. Open Maccy, pick the item that belongs at the cursor, and paste it. Repeat for the next item.
Because Maccy Clipboard supports search, you don’t need to remember the order you copied things. Type a few characters of the snippet you want and it narrows the list. The default history size is 200 items , which is plenty for a working session but not for a week.
Tip: copy the source URL right after each quote. The URL then sits next to the quote in your history, and you can paste both into Craft back to back and format the citation there.
When should you paste as plain text?
Text copied from a web page often carries fonts, sizes, colors, and link styling. Pasted into a rich editor, that can leave a document looking patchwork. If you want the text to take on your Craft styles instead, paste it without formatting.
Maccy has a setting for this: in Settings → General you can control whether pasting happens automatically and whether formatting is removed, and a modifier key can flip the behavior for a single paste . Craft also has its own paste-and-match-style behavior through the macOS Edit menu . Use whichever is faster for you, but test both once, because the two apps can interpret «plain» slightly differently.
| Content type | Best paste mode | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Quote from a web article | Plain text | Keeps Craft’s typography consistent |
| Text from another Craft doc | Formatted | Preserves headings, lists, and block structure |
| Table copied from a spreadsheet | Try formatted first | Plain text may flatten columns |
| Code or terminal output | Plain text, then format as code | Avoids stray styling |
| Screenshots | Formatted (image) | Maccy stores images and pastes them as images |
What should you pin in Maccy for document work?
Pinned items stay at the top of Maccy and aren’t pushed out as new copies arrive. In my view the best candidates are things you type often but don’t want to maintain as a full template:
- A meeting-notes skeleton such as Attendees, Decisions, and Action items
- Your standard status-update sentence
- A project’s key links, such as the repo, the board, and the shared folder
- Your email signature or a short bio
To pin an item, select it in Maccy and press Option + P . You can review pinned items later in Maccy’s settings.
Pins work in every app, which is the real advantage. A Craft template only helps when you’re already in Craft. A pinned snippet pastes into Craft, Mail, and a chat window equally.
What should you keep out of your clipboard history?
A clipboard history is a convenience feature, and it’s also a plain record of everything you copied. Two precautions are worth taking before you rely on it for document work.
- Ignore sensitive apps. In Settings → Ignore, add your password manager and any app where you handle credentials . Maccy can also skip items that apps flag as concealed or transient, which many password managers do .
- Be deliberate with client material. If a document contains confidential text, remember that it passed through your clipboard history on its way to Craft. Clear the history afterward if that matters for your work. Maccy has a clear option in its menu, and a setting to clear history on quit .
Maccy also supports ignoring by pattern (regex), which can catch things like API keys that match a known format . Treat that as a backstop, not a replacement for ignoring the source app.
Where does this workflow fall short?
Honesty matters here, because a clipboard manager won’t fix everything.
- It isn’t storage. Maccy’s history is capped and can be cleared. If you copy something you’ll need next month, put it in Craft immediately.
- It doesn’t sync across devices. Your Mac’s history won’t appear on your iPhone. Craft will, which is another reason to move anything important into it .
- Rich content can behave unpredictably. Complex tables, embedded content, and unusual formats may not round-trip identically between apps. Test your most common source once and note what works.
- It adds one more shortcut to remember. If you rarely juggle multiple snippets, the built-in clipboard may be enough.
A practical setup you can try in ten minutes
- Install Maccy from the GitHub project or with Homebrew (
brew install maccy) . - Add your password manager under the Ignore settings.
- Pin three snippets you paste into documents every week.
- Write your next Craft document using the gather-then-place method above.
- At the end of the week, notice which pinned items you never used, and swap them for ones you did.
Frequently asked questions
Can Maccy paste directly into Craft?
Yes. Maccy works at the system level, so it can paste into any app that accepts pasted text or images, including Craft. You may need to grant it Accessibility permission in macOS System Settings for automatic pasting to work .
Does Maccy keep Craft’s formatting when I copy from a Craft document?
Maccy stores rich text, so formatted content you copy from Craft can generally be pasted back with its formatting intact. Behavior with complex blocks can vary, so test it with your own documents.
Is Maccy safe for sensitive documents?
It’s a local history, but it still records what you copy. Ignore sensitive apps, clear the history after confidential work, and avoid copying secrets you don’t need to copy.
Do I need Maccy if I already use Craft?
Not necessarily. Craft manages documents, while Maccy manages the short-term clipboard. It helps most when you regularly pull material from several apps into one document.
The bottom line
Let Maccy handle the messy in-between moments, and let Craft hold what you want to keep. The two do different jobs and don’t compete. If you try the gather-then-place method on your next document, which part of your writing process slows you down most?
Maccy is free and open source, so the only cost is the ten minutes it takes to set up.