For Developers
The clipboard with an
MCP server.
Recopy has a built-in MCP server that lets Claude and Cursor search your clipboard history. Read-only. Sensitive items never leave the database. No separate install — it's part of the app.
Why It Matters
Your clipboard is context. Your AI should have it.
Everything you copied today — endpoints, error messages, SQL, snippets from docs — is exactly the context you end up re-pasting into AI chats by hand. With recopy-mcp, the assistant just asks the clipboard.
> What was that curl command I copied
from the API docs this morning?
● recopy — search_clipboard("curl")
Found it — copied at 09:41 from Safari:
curl -X POST https://api.example.com/v2/ingest \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"source": "clipboard"}'
Want me to adapt it for your staging host?>What was that API endpoint I copied about an hour ago?
>Find the SQL query I copied from TablePlus yesterday.
>I copied three error messages today — summarize what they have in common.
>Get the JSON I copied last and generate a TypeScript type for it.
Example prompts — the assistant answers from your actual history via full-text search.
Setup
One command for Claude Code.
The MCP server is built into the Recopy app you already have — no separate download. It speaks MCP over stdio and auto-detects your Recopy database. Register it once and it's available in every session.
Claude Code
claude mcp add recopy -- /Applications/Recopy.app/Contents/MacOS/Recopy --mcp
Cursor / Claude Desktop
{
"mcpServers": {
"recopy": {
"command": "/Applications/Recopy.app/Contents/MacOS/Recopy",
"args": ["--mcp"]
}
}
}The server finds your clipboard database automatically; pass --db <path> to point it somewhere else. Need help getting set up? See Support.
The API
Three tools. All read-only.
search_clipboard(query, limit)
Full-text search across your history with prefix matching — content, custom names, and source apps. Powered by the same FTS5 index as the app.
get_recent_items(limit, type?)
The latest items, optionally filtered by content type: text, code, link, image, or file.
get_item(id)
The full text of a single item by id — used when a search preview is truncated and the assistant needs the whole thing.
Privacy Model
Designed so the worst case is boring.
Read-only, enforced
The database connection is opened read-only. There are no tools to write, edit, or delete — the AI can look, never touch.
Sensitive items never returned
Anything Recopy flags as sensitive — credit cards, SSNs, API keys, private keys, JWTs — is filtered out in the SQL query itself. No tool can retrieve it.
Local by design
recopy-mcp is a small local executable talking to a local database over stdio. It makes no network requests of its own.
Frequently asked questions
What is a clipboard MCP server?
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard that lets AI assistants like Claude connect to external data sources through small local servers. recopy-mcp is one of those servers: it exposes your Recopy clipboard history so an assistant can search it — instead of you re-copying and re-pasting context by hand.
Can Claude modify or delete my clipboard history?
No. recopy-mcp opens the database in read-only mode and exposes only read tools: search, list recent, and fetch by id. There is no write path.
Will my passwords or API keys be exposed to the AI?
No. Items that Recopy flags as sensitive — credit cards, SSNs, API keys, private keys, JWTs — are excluded at the database query level. They are never returned through the MCP interface, regardless of what the assistant asks for.
Which AI tools work with recopy-mcp?
Anything that speaks MCP over stdio: Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, and other MCP-capable clients. Registration is a one-line command in Claude Code or a short JSON entry elsewhere.
Does this send my clipboard to the cloud?
recopy-mcp itself makes no network requests — it reads your local Recopy database and hands results to the MCP client on your machine. What the AI assistant then does with content you ask it to use follows that assistant's own privacy policy, so the same care applies as with anything you paste into a chat.
Give your AI a memory of what you copied.
Recopy is free to start on the App Store. recopy-mcp comes with it.
See how Recopy compares: vs Paste · vs Maccy · Best clipboard managers for Mac