Help: Nine Boxes

Nine Boxes gives your Mac nine numbered clipboards instead of one. You save things to a box by number, and paste them back by number, so a set of related items can travel together instead of being copied one at a time.

Getting started

The two shortcuts

There are only two to learn.

Shortcut	What it does
`⌘⌃C`	Save, then press a digit `1` to `9` to choose a box
`⌘⌃V`	Paste, then press a digit `1` to `9` to choose a box

Both are hold-then-press, not chords you press all at once. Hold ⌘ and ⌃, tap C, let go, then tap the number.

Saving something

Select some text and press ⌘⌃C, then a digit.

You do not have to copy first. If you have a selection, Nine Boxes copies it for you. If you have no selection, it saves whatever is already on your clipboard.

Pasting it back

Click where you want the text, press ⌘⌃V, then the same digit. The text is pasted into whatever app you are in.

Your normal clipboard is put back roughly a third of a second later, so pasting from Nine Boxes does not disturb the ordinary ⌘C / ⌘V you use all day.

Choosing boxes

Boxes do not fill in order. ⌘⌃C then 4 puts something in box 4 whether or not boxes 1 through 3 are empty. Saving to a box that is already full replaces what was there.

Pick boxes that mean something to you: a name in 1, an address in 2, an account number in 3. The numbers become muscle memory.

The HUD

Press and hold ⌘⌃V without pressing a digit and a panel appears showing all nine boxes, what is in each, and where it came from.

It waits a fraction of a second before appearing, so if you type the shortcut and the digit in one quick motion you never see it. That delay is adjustable in Settings → General.

Searching instead of counting

With the paste HUD open, start typing instead of pressing a number. Boxes that do not match dim out. Press Return to paste the first match.

Typing only searches when you are pasting. When you are saving there is nothing to search, because you are choosing a destination, so typing a letter closes the HUD and lets that keystroke through to whatever you were writing.

Everyday use

Boxes and history are different things

Boxes are the nine you save to deliberately. They stay until you replace them, and they survive quitting, restarting, and rebooting.

History is everything you copy, recorded automatically in the background. It holds up to 1,000 items or 500MB, and clears itself after 7 days. Items you have saved to a box are never expired, however old they are.

You can browse history in the main Nine Boxes window.

What can go in a box

Plain text, formatted text, HTML, images, and file references. Nine Boxes keeps every format an item came with rather than flattening it, so pasting into a word processor keeps your formatting and pasting the same item into a terminal gives plain text.

Emergency stop

Hold Escape for three seconds and Nine Boxes stops watching your keyboard entirely. Use it any time it seems to be interfering with typing.

A dialog appears offering to switch shortcuts back on. If you dismiss it, there is a Turn Shortcuts Back On item in the menu bar menu.

Erasing everything

⌘⌃⇧⌫ clears every box, all history, and every file on disk immediately. There is no undo. The same button lives in Settings → Privacy.

Troubleshooting

Nothing happens when I press the shortcut

Work down this list in order.

1. Check Accessibility permission. Open the Nine Boxes menu bar icon. If the icon is a warning triangle instead of a grid, permission is missing. Choose Diagnostics and click Grant Access.

2. Restart Nine Boxes if you just granted it. macOS takes a few seconds to release keyboard access to a newly approved app. Nine Boxes retries by itself for about twenty seconds, and offers a Restart button if that is not enough.

3. Check for secure input. When any app turns on secure input, such as a focused password field or some terminals, macOS stops delivering keystrokes to every background utility on the system, including this one. Diagnostics shows whether this is happening. Clicking away from the password field clears it.

4. Check for a conflict. Another app may have claimed your shortcut. Settings → Shortcuts lists conflicts it can detect and lets you rebind Nine Boxes to something free.

I granted permission and it still does not work

This is almost always a stale permission entry, left behind when the app was moved or updated.

Open Settings → Advanced → Diagnostics. If it reports that Nine Boxes is correctly signed but still untrusted, do this:

Open System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility
Select Nine Boxes and click the − button to remove it
Add it back with +, or just launch Nine Boxes and grant again

It worked, then suddenly stopped

Two usual causes:

Secure input, described above. It comes and goes as you focus password fields.
The kill switch. If you rested a finger on Escape for three seconds, shortcuts switched themselves off. The menu bar menu will say Shortcuts: Disabled by kill switch.

It saved the wrong thing

⌘⌃C copies your current selection. With nothing selected, it saves whatever was already on your clipboard instead. If you meant to capture a selection, check it was still selected. Clicking elsewhere first clears it.

Another app uses my shortcut

All three Nine Boxes shortcuts are rebindable in Settings → Shortcuts. Click one, press the new combination, done. Shortcuts must include ⌘, ⌃, or ⌥.

Nine Boxes can read macOS's own shortcut list exactly and will tell you if a combination is already taken by the system. Other apps store their shortcuts privately, so it can only warn you that a known keyboard tool is installed. It cannot read that app's bindings.

The HUD appears when I do not want it

Increase the delay in Settings → General. At a longer delay you will only see it when you deliberately pause.

Privacy

What is stored, and where

Everything stays on your Mac, in ~/Library/Application Support/com.chaseyoursolutions.nineboxes.

Everything you save is locked on this Mac with a key only this Mac has. The lock opens only while your Mac is unlocked, and the key never leaves: it is not synced to iCloud and it is not included in a backup. If you restore a backup onto a different Mac, what you saved is unreadable there rather than readable.

Timestamps, item sizes, and the name of the app you copied from are stored unencrypted. Content never is.

Password managers

Nine Boxes never captures content marked private by the app that copied it. 1Password and other well-behaved apps set a flag on the clipboard for exactly this purpose, and Nine Boxes skips the whole item when it sees that flag, including any plain-text version travelling alongside it.

That flag is voluntary, and not every password manager sets it. Apple Passwords does not: copying a password from it produces plain text with no flag at all. So Nine Boxes also ships with a list of apps it never reads from, and Apple Passwords, Keychain Access, and the major third-party managers are on it out of the box. Nothing copied while a listed app is frontmost is read or stored at all, and pressing the save shortcut there is refused rather than performed.

Settings → Privacy shows that list, and you can add any app to it or remove one. If a manager you use is missing, add it there.

One case Nine Boxes cannot cover: a password copied from a web browser looks exactly like anything else copied in that browser, so it is recorded in your history like any other copy. Excluding your browser would cost you your browser history entirely, so it is left to you. Your history is kept on this Mac, encrypted, for the number of days you choose, and Settings → Privacy can turn it off or erase it.

One consequence worth knowing: when you paste from a box, Nine Boxes normally restores your previous clipboard afterwards. If your clipboard held a password at that moment, it deliberately does not read it, even briefly, so the box's content stays on your clipboard instead of the password being restored.

What leaves your Mac

Nothing you copy. Not the contents of a box, not your history, not a preview, not the name of an app you copied from. None of it is sent anywhere.

Three other things do leave, and none of them carry what you copied:

Signing in. Your email address, when you give one, so your subscription can follow you to another Mac.
Checking your subscription. Once your Mac has a valid answer it keeps it, and Nine Boxes keeps working for a week without asking again.
Checking for updates. Once a day, Nine Boxes asks nineboxes.app whether a newer version exists. It sends the version you are running and your macOS version, so it can tell whether an update applies to you. Nothing else. You can switch this off in Preferences, and you will then only find out about updates by choosing Check for Updates yourself.

When AI features arrive, the exact claim will be this, and no broader:

Your synced boxes are end-to-end encrypted and we cannot read them. AI actions you explicitly trigger send that specific snippet to Anthropic for processing.

AI actions will always be something you trigger deliberately, and always labelled where you trigger them.

Which computers it runs on

Nine Boxes is a Mac app, and only a Mac app

It runs on macOS 14 (Sonoma) and later, on both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs.

There is no Windows version, no Linux version, no iPhone or iPad version, and nothing that runs in a browser. Not "coming soon", not in testing. If you are not on a Mac, Nine Boxes cannot help you today.

Why not Windows

Nine Boxes is built directly on the parts of macOS that handle the keyboard and the clipboard. Those have no equivalent on another system, so a Windows version would be a new product sharing a name rather than the same one recompiled. That is a real project, not a port, and it is not underway.

Will it work on my Mac

If your Mac runs macOS 14 or later, yes. To check: Apple menu, then About This Mac. The number under macOS is the one that matters.

Macs from roughly 2018 onward can run macOS 14. Anything older cannot, and Nine Boxes will not install.

I am on an older macOS

Nine Boxes will refuse to open rather than half work. If you can update to macOS 14 or later, it will run afterwards. If your Mac cannot go that far, there is nothing we can do for you, and we would rather say so than take your money.

One licence, more than one Mac

Your subscription is tied to your account, not to a machine. Sign in on a second Mac and Pro is there. What does not travel yet is the contents of your boxes: those live on each Mac separately until cross device syncing ships.

Plans

Nine Boxes is currently unrestricted while subscriptions are being built. This section will describe Free and Pro, the trial, and what happens if a subscription lapses, once that is finished and can be described accurately.

Getting help

Choose Help from the Nine Boxes menu bar icon, or email chase@chaseyoursolutions.com.

If you are reporting a problem, Settings → Advanced → Copy Diagnostics to Clipboard gathers your version, permission state, and shortcut bindings. Pasting that into your email answers most of the questions we would otherwise have to ask.