Meet Bob… ClipBob!

Your clipboard history across all your Macs — secure, private, free.

Bob is the quiet one in your menu bar who remembers everything you copy — and, unlike your Mac’s clipboard, remembers it on all of your Macs at once. Here’s why Bob exists.

I run what’s honestly become a small home lab. Across the family there are six active Macs, a stack of iPads and iPhones, a few Linux workstations, and more Raspberry Pis than I can reasonably account for — plus a graveyard of dormant machines I keep meaning to wipe. Somewhere in all of that, I personally bounce between three Macs every day, and several times a day I copy something on one of them that I need on another — a link, a code snippet, a command, an image, or just some text — and the clipboard, being a thing of a single machine, has no idea. Universal Clipboard helps for the very last thing you copied, but I wanted my history, everywhere. So I built ClipBob.

There are plenty of clipboard history managers already, and some are very good. But I wanted something minimal that just does what it’s supposed to and gets out of the way — available on all my Macs, respectful of my privacy, and secure. So ClipBob is deliberately small: hit a hotkey, a panel appears, type to filter, Enter to paste. The one addition is that the list also holds what you copied on your other Macs, merged by recency and searchable, with a quiet tag for which machine and application each clip came from. That’s the whole product — the one thing a local clipboard can’t do, built so you forget it’s there.

A few things I cared about. It’s private: your clips live only in your own iCloud — never a server of mine — and they’re end-to-end encrypted if you have Advanced Data Protection turned on. Passwords from your password manager are never stored at all; ClipBob isn’t a vault and shouldn’t be. And if something you’d rather not keep slips into the history, you can delete any clip — it’s removed from all your Macs, not just the one in front of you. It’s minimal on purpose — one hotkey, type to filter, Tab to scope to text or images or a particular Mac, and nothing else asking for your attention. And it’s free.

Honest status: this is an early preview. The core — capture, cross-Mac sync, paste — works and is tested. Onboarding and settings are still rough, and you’ll find an edge or two. It updates itself, so fixes will reach you automatically. If you’ve got more than one Mac and want to try it, it’s at clipbob.app — or brew install --cask cloudcraft-ai/tap/clipbob if you prefer Homebrew. I’d like to hear what breaks.

— Jagmeet