Your clipboard holds one thing.
Holdover holds all of them.
Text, links, colours, code, images, screenshots and files, kept as you copy them and handed back with one keystroke. Rest the pointer in the notch, or press ⇧⌘V. It never sends any of it anywhere.
Version 1.0.0 · macOS 13 or later · Apple silicon & Intel
It comes down from the notch
Rest the pointer where the notch is and a shelf drops from the top edge of the screen, one row of cards wide enough to read. Move away and it slides back up, the way a menu does. Nothing to click, nothing to dismiss. ⇧⌘V gives you the same history as a grid instead, placed where Spotlight puts itself.
Search that actually narrows
Bare words match anywhere: the text, the source app, the file name, even the words inside a screenshot. Operators cut it down, like app:figma, kind:image, is:pinned or today. Ranking weighs relevance against how recent a clip is, whether you pinned it and how often you come back to it.
Copy a colour, get every notation
A hex value is recognised as a colour, so the card is the colour and the preview carries HEX, RGB, HSL, CMYK and a SwiftUI literal, each copyable on its own. Pick one off the screen with the eyedropper in the search bar without leaving whatever you were doing.
Screenshots you can search
Text inside an image is read on device as the clip arrives, so a screenshot of an invoice is found by the amount printed on it. The reading happens in a short lived child process that exits as soon as it has answered, and nothing is uploaded.
Change it on the way out
Paste as plain text, or as a case, a slug, JSON, base64 or a URL encoding, with a preview of each before you commit. ⌘E edits a clip first and re-reads it as it saves, so a sentence corrected into a hex value becomes a colour.
Line them up, paste them in order
Queue the clips you need in the order you need them and each one takes a number. Then paste them one after another with ⌃⌘V, without opening the window again, which is how a form with six fields gets filled without six trips back here.
Nothing leaves your Mac
No account, no sync, no telemetry: out of the box the app opens no network connections at all. Two settings can change that, both off until you ask, and the update check is one of them. Password managers are excluded from the start, anything that looks like a credential is kept with its preview hidden, and clips copied on your iPhone are left on your iPhone.
Four steps, and only the first time
Holdover cannot ship on the Mac App Store, because an app that watches the pasteboard and pastes into other apps cannot be sandboxed. So it is a direct download, and macOS will make you say yes before it runs.
- 1
Drag Holdover to Applications
Open the disk image and drop the app into Applications, the usual way.
- 2
Open it, and let macOS refuse
Holdover is not signed with an Apple Developer ID, so the first launch is blocked with a warning that macOS cannot check it for malware. That is expected. It means the app is unsigned, not that something is wrong with it.
- 3
System Settings › Privacy & Security › Open Anyway
Scroll down to the Security section. macOS names Holdover there and offers to open it anyway. You do this once. Holdover has no Dock icon, so look for its item in the menu bar afterwards.
- 4
Allow Accessibility when it asks
Holdover opens a short tour on first launch, showing what it does, and ends by asking for Accessibility. It uses that for one thing: pressing ⌘V in the window you were working in.
This one is genuinely optional. Say no and everything still works, except that the clip is put on your clipboard and you press ⌘V yourself. Nothing else needs a permission: the global shortcut uses Carbon hot keys, which need none, and the notch hover is a tracking area rather than anything watching your input.
Comfortable in a terminal?
This clears the quarantine flag and skips steps 2 and 3.
Nothing is ever installed for you. Settings, General has a check that asks the download site for a version number once a day, off until you turn it on, and all it does is tell you. Updating is still yours to do: download the disk image again and replace the app, which changes its signature, so macOS revokes Accessibility and step 4 comes round once more. Your history is untouched by any of this. It lives in Application Support, not inside the app.
Nothing to
sign up for
Free, local, and about 4 MB. It idles at eight thousandths of one percent of a core, so you can leave it running and forget it is there.
Version 1.0.0 · macOS 13 or later · Apple silicon & Intel