Yank is a clipboard manager with natural-language search for macOS, Windows, and Linux. Ask for the phone number from earlier, that repo I copied last Tuesday, or the hex value from Figma — and paste exactly that. Nothing else.
Most clipboard managers give you a list. Yank gives you the one thing you were actually looking for — because it knows what each clip is.
Ask the way you'd ask a coworker. “The Stripe link from Monday.” “That hex I copied at lunch.” Yank parses the phrase, matches the timeframe, and returns the right clip.
Every clip is classified on the fly — phone numbers, dates, URLs, GitHub repos, hex colors, code, calendar events, addresses, emails. Filter by type without typing a filter.
The classifier runs on-device. Your clipboard never touches a server. No cloud sync unless you turn it on. No telemetry, no analytics, no exceptions.
Yank remembers where each clip came from — the app, the window title, the URL if it was a browser. “From Figma” or “from Slack” narrows results instantly.
Yank handles screenshots, file paths, RGB and hex swatches, rich text, and plain. The same query language works across every format.
⌘⇧V opens the picker. Type to search, ask in plain language, or just arrow through. Enter pastes. No mouse, no context switch, no app to leave open.
On macOS we ship through Homebrew so the app launches the first time without Gatekeeper warnings. Windows and Linux are direct downloads — both verified by the updater's signing key.
Copy the command, paste it into Terminal. Yank lives in
/Applications and updates with brew upgrade.
Apple Silicon only · Intel Mac build coming soon — for now, build from source.
Grab the .dmg (18 MB), then run
this once before opening so macOS doesn't claim it's "damaged":
Download the installer and double-click. Yank auto-updates from the in-app menu — no reinstall needed.
Download
.exe · 12 MB NSIS installer · signed by the Yank updater key.
Download the AppImage, make it executable, run it. Or grab the
.deb if you prefer apt.
.AppImage · 94 MB You don't change how you copy. You just gain a smarter way to retrieve.
Yank watches the system clipboard. Every ⌘C is captured, classified, and quietly archived — text, images, files, code, URLs, the lot.
Hit ⌘⇧V in any app. Yank floats above your work — never steals focus, never opens a window you have to dismiss.
Type a phrase: "github repo from yesterday", "the long phone number", "that color from the Figma file." Press ↵ to paste the top match — or arrow to pick another.
No. Yank is local-first. The classifier and the natural-language search both run on your device. Optional Pro sync is opt-in and end-to-end encrypted — even the developer cannot read it. Yank does not collect analytics events tied to clip content.
Yank uses two layers. First, a lightweight on-device model tags each clip with a type and extracts entities like phone, date, repo, color, address, and so on. Second, when you ask a question, Yank matches your phrasing against those tags, the time window you mentioned, and the source app. By default it uses a bundled BGE Small ONNX embedding model — no API key, no round trip to the cloud.
Yes. The Yank desktop app is MIT-licensed and the full source is on GitHub at github.com/piyushpradhan/yank. There is no paywall on the core app. An optional Pro sync server is source-available — you can read it, you can self-host it, you just cannot resell it.
Yank runs natively on macOS 12 and later, Windows 10 and later, and Linux (GTK with Wayland or X11). It is built with Tauri, so installers are about 14 MB and use the OS WebView instead of bundling Chromium.
Yank is purpose-built for clipboard search. Unlike Raycast and Alfred (which are launchers), Yank does not try to replace your spotlight — it complements them by handling the paste flow only. Unlike Maccy and Paste, Yank ships with on-device semantic search out of the box, so you can describe what you copied instead of scrolling through a list. It is also free, open-source, and cross-platform.
Yank detects sensitive patterns — credit cards, API tokens, things that look like passwords — and either skips them entirely or stores them with a short expiry. Yank also respects the "concealed" flag set by password managers like 1Password, so secrets are not archived. Pro adds custom redaction rules per pattern.
The installer is approximately 14 MB. The bundled local embedding model (BGE Small ONNX) adds about 130 MB on first run. At idle Yank uses well under 100 MB of RAM and captures clips in under 500 milliseconds.
Yes. Yank co-exists with 1Password, Bitwarden, Raycast, Alfred, and similar tools. It only intercepts the paste flow and respects the concealed-clipboard flag, so password manager autofill is never archived.