Free Tool · Mac App
HotCopy
A clipboard manager for macOS that captures everything you copy — not just the text, but every raw representation an app puts on the pasteboard. Click any past item and your next ⌘V pastes it back byte-for-byte, so pasting into the original app works exactly like the original copy. Built by a music copyist, so it handles Finale's private clipboard formats that ordinary clipboard managers lose.
Download
Free, no sign-up. Download the DMG, drag HotCopy to Applications, and launch it from the menu bar.
What It Does
- Full-fidelity capture — stores every pasteboard representation: plain text, RTF, HTML, images, file URLs, and app-private binary payloads
- Always-on-top panel — floats above every app on every Space and never steals focus from what you're working in
- 5 Hot Slots — park anything in an always-ready slot and fire it from any app with ⌃⌘1–⌃⌘5; slots survive restarts
- Pins & search — keep favorites above the fray and search history by content, source app, or type
- Click → ⌘V — click an item to arm it; your next paste uses it. ⌘-click pastes it immediately
- Payload Inspector — see every type identifier on a clipboard item, decoded as text, XML, or image, with a hex view for the rest
- Menu bar resident — no Dock icon, no clutter
- Private by design — history lives on your Mac; HotCopy has no network code at all
Keys & Clicks
| Toggle the panel from anywhere | ⌃⌘V |
| Arm an item, then paste it wherever you are | click, then ⌘V |
| Paste an item immediately into the frontmost app | ⌘-click |
| Fire hot slot 1–5 from any app | ⌃⌘1 … ⌃⌘5 |
| Save an item to a hot slot | right-click → Save to Hot Slot |
| Plain-text copy, pin, inspect, or delete | right-click |
| Hide the panel | Esc |
Why Copyists Like It
Copy a measure in Finale and it lands on the clipboard as a private binary format that normal clipboard managers silently drop. HotCopy keeps the raw payload, so you can bank several passages in the hot slots and paste each one back into Finale later, exactly as copied. The Payload Inspector also lets you peek behind the hood at what any app — Finale, Sketch, Logic, Keynote — actually puts on the clipboard when you copy.