How Magpie works.

What Magpie is, and the one thing to learn first.

What Magpie does

Magpie is a keyboard-driven clipboard manager for Windows. It runs quietly in the system tray, captures everything you copy — text, images, files, folder paths, colors, links — and gives it back instantly through an overlay you summon with one hotkey. The thing you copied twenty minutes ago is never gone.

Magpie has no main window. It lives in the tray, and Ctrl+Shift+V is how you reach everything: your full history, pinned clips, collections, and your own snippets, all in one searchable list.

Free vs Pro at a glance

Everything described on this page is in the free version — capture, the overlay, pins, collections, snippets, on-paste transforms, and every privacy control. A paid Pro tier is planned for power-user features like unlimited retention, paste queues, text expansion, and encrypted sync. Privacy and data ownership are never paid features.

Where your history lives

Magpie processes and stores your clipboard history locally on your computer. Nothing is uploaded to DataForge Tools or any third party. The local store is encrypted at rest, and you can export all of it at any time.

One setup file, no account, and it starts with Windows.

1. Download and install

Get the installer from the download page, run it, and follow the prompts. Magpie is free to use with no sign-in.

2. Find it in the tray

After install, Magpie starts automatically and adds an icon to the system tray (near the clock). There's no window to open — right-click the tray icon for settings, pause, and quit.

3. Copy something, then press the hotkey

Copy a few things as you normally would, then press Ctrl+Shift+V to open the overlay over whatever app you're in. Your recent clips are right there.

Starting with Windows

Run at login is on by default so your history is always being captured. Turn it off in Settings if you'd rather launch Magpie by hand.

One hotkey, entirely keyboard-driven, gone the moment you're done.

Summoning and dismissing

Ctrl+Shift+V opens the overlay on top of whatever you're doing, focus already in the search box. Esc closes it without pasting and returns focus to the app you were in.

Keyboard controls

How pasting works

When you paste from the overlay, Magpie puts the clip on the system clipboard and sends a paste to the previously focused window — so it lands exactly where your cursor was. If an on-paste transform is selected, it's applied to the content first.

Every copy is saved, tagged, and attributed — with nothing for you to do.

What gets captured

Whenever you copy or cut, Magpie records the content along with its type, the time, and the application it came from. Duplicate consecutive copies of the same thing are collapsed into one entry with an updated timestamp.

Pausing capture

One toggle — in the tray menu or Settings — pauses all capture. Nothing is recorded until you turn it back on. Use it before working with data you don't want in your history at all.

What's never captured

Content from excluded apps (password managers and banking apps out of the box) and anything detected as sensitive is skipped at capture time and never written to disk. See Privacy & security.

One list, whatever you copied — each type rendered so it's useful at a glance.

Oversized clips are folded in the list and expand in the preview pane. Anything that looks sensitive stays masked until you reveal it.

Keep the things you reach for again where you can find them.

Pins

Pin a clip to keep it at the top of the list and exempt from retention cleanup. Good for the address, account number, or paragraph you paste every week.

Collections

Group related clips into a named collection — an onboarding email, a set of code blocks, the assets for one project — and filter the overlay to just that collection.

Snippets

Author your own reusable text — email templates, boilerplate, signatures — as snippets. They live in the same searchable list as captured clips and paste the same way, with the same on-paste transforms available.

Reshape the content on its way out — no round-trip through an editor.

Pick a transform in the overlay before you paste, and Magpie applies it to the clip's content as it lands:

Transforms never change the stored clip — only what gets pasted this one time.

Narrow a long history down to the one clip you want.

Fuzzy search

Type in the overlay to fuzzy-match across every clip's content and metadata. Results re-rank as you type; the top nine get quick keys 1–9.

Filters

• By type — text, image, file, color, link, snippet, and so on.
• By source app — show only clips copied from a particular application.
• By collection — scope the list to one collection.
• Pinned only — just your pinned clips.

Preview & metadata

The preview pane shows the full clip — the whole image, the complete text, the full path. A metadata panel shows the type, the source app, and when it was captured.

Free at every tier — never a paid feature.

App exclusions

Password managers and banking apps are excluded out of the box — copies made in them are never recorded. Add or remove apps from the exclusion list in Settings.

Sensitive-content detection

Content that looks sensitive — things shaped like passwords, card numbers, or keys — is detected at capture time and never written to disk. Where a clip is stored but looks sensitive, it's masked in the list until you choose to reveal it.

Encryption at rest

The local history store is encrypted at rest on your machine.

Pause & clear

One toggle pauses all capture. You can delete any clip from the overlay, clear the whole history at once, or set retention rules to age clips out automatically.

Export

Full data export is available on every tier — your history is yours to take with you.

How long clips stick around, and how to change that.

Free tier limits

The free version keeps history for 30 days or 1,000 clips, whichever comes first. When either limit is reached, the oldest un-pinned clips are removed.

Pinned clips are exempt

Pinning a clip takes it out of retention entirely — it stays until you unpin or delete it, regardless of age or the clip count.

Scheduled cleanup

You can also set a retention rule to delete clips older than a chosen age on a schedule, independent of the tier limits — useful if you want a shorter window than 30 days.

Reached from the tray icon — the few things worth adjusting.

General

• Run at login — start Magpie automatically with Windows (on by default).
• Overlay hotkey — rebind from Ctrl+Shift+V to a combination you prefer.
• Theme — Dark, Light, or follow the OS.

Capture

• Pause capture — stop recording until re-enabled.
• Excluded apps — the list of applications Magpie ignores.
• Sensitive-content detection — on by default; tune how aggressive it is.

History

• Retention rule — auto-delete clips older than a chosen age.
• Clear history — wipe all captured clips (pins and snippets kept unless you choose otherwise).
• Export — write your full history out to a file.

Not available yet — this is the roadmap. Pricing and timing aren't set.

Magpie Pro will be a one-time purchase, the same as every other DataForge tool — no subscription. The planned feature set:

• Unlimited history retention with per-type and per-source rules
• Paste queues (Stacks) — copy many things in order, then paste them in order — plus per-action hotkeys
• Text expansion and a rules engine
• Regex search and image-OCR search
• Code-language and structured-data detection
• End-to-end encrypted sync across your machines

Privacy and data ownership stay free at every tier — app exclusions, sensitive-content detection, encryption at rest, and full data export are never paid. Want to be told when Pro lands? Mention it when you reply to any DataForge email, or check back on the Magpie pricing section.

What to send, and fixes for the usual snags.

Reporting an issue

Reply to any DataForge Tools email with your Windows version, the Magpie version from the tray menu's About, and a short description of what you did and what happened.

Common questions

• The hotkey does nothing — another app may have claimed Ctrl+Shift+V. Rebind the overlay hotkey in Settings.
• Nothing is being captured — check that capture isn't paused (tray menu), and that the app you're copying from isn't on the excluded list.
• A clip I expected isn't there — it may have been skipped by sensitive-content detection, or aged out by the 30-day / 1,000-clip limit. Pin clips you need to keep.
• Pasting goes to the wrong place — Magpie pastes into the window that had focus before the overlay opened; click into the target field first, then press the hotkey.
• Magpie didn't start with Windows — enable Run at login in Settings.

Removing Magpie

Uninstall from Windows Settings → Apps like any other program. Your local history store is removed with it; export first if you want to keep it.