Find & replace clipboard text on your Mac — with regex

Q: Do I need to know regular expressions to use it?

No. Leave the Regular Expression toggle off and a rule is a plain find & replace: Hi becomes Hello, and dots, brackets and dollar signs mean exactly themselves.

Q: Does it work line by line on multi-line text?

Yes — start the pattern with (?m), and ^ and $ mean the start and end of each line. Find (?m)^(.+)$ · Replace "$1" wraps every line in quotes: London / Paris / Berlin becomes "London" / "Paris" / "Berlin". Without (?m), ^ and $ match only the start and end of the whole text, so a per‑line rule does nothing on multi‑line input.

Write a rule once — plain text or a regular expression — and run it on whatever you've copied, straight from the menu bar. No Terminal, no shell script.

Download for macOS See how it works

Free · On-device · macOS 13.3+

Run a regex on your clipboard without writing a shell script

1

Copy

Copy the text you want to change — from any app. ⌘C.
2

Click

Click the Clip Text Transform icon in the menu bar and click your rule — it sits in the menu with everything else. No rule yet? Manage Custom Scripts… → Add New: type what to find and what to replace it with, and save.
3

Paste

The result is on your clipboard. ⌘V.

Custom find & replace without the Terminal

Each row is one saved rule and one click:

Reorder fields

Find (\w+), (\w+)

Replace $2 $1

Doe, Jane Jane Doe
Reformat a date

Find (\d+)/(\d+)/(\d+)

Replace $3-$1-$2

03/25/2026 2026-03-25
Fix spacing before punctuation

Find [ ]+([,.!?;:])

Replace $1

Hello , world ! Hello, world!
Mask digits

Find [0-9]

Replace *

1234 ****
No regex at all

Find Hi

Replace Hello

Hi, Jane! Hello, Jane!
Quote every line

Find (?m)^(.+)$

Replace "$1"

London Paris Berlin "London" "Paris" "Berlin"

Full regex support — capture groups, $1 and $2 in the replacement

With Regular Expression on, the pattern is a real regular expression — ICU syntax, the engine behind Apple's NSRegularExpression. Capture groups come back in the replacement as $1, $2 and so on, $0 is the whole match, and inline flags work: (?i) for case-insensitive matching, (?m) for line-by-line ^ and $, (?s) to let . cross line breaks.

Two things worth knowing before you type: a real line break in Replace is entered with the Enter key — typing \n as two characters inserts a plain n — and group references are written $1, not \1.

Type a sample under Testing in the rule editor and the result updates with every edit of Find or Replace. The preview stays empty until Find has a value (or Replace uses {text}), and an invalid pattern clears it and shows an inline error. The {text} placeholder, by the way: leave Find empty, and in Replace it stands for your whole clipboard text — Replace becomes a wrapper around it.

Save the rule once — next time it's one menu item

Save the rule and it's a permanent item in the menu. Recent lists what you've just run and Favorites pins what you run daily, so a rule you use every morning is one click from the top of the menu. Need it on a colleague's Mac? Export writes your scripts to a file they can import — import, export and organize your scripts has its own page.

Runs on your Mac — on any copied text, from any app

The rule runs on your Mac, on whatever is on your clipboard — copied from a browser, an editor, anywhere you can press ⌘C. No text field to paste into, no service in the loop: the text you convert stays on your Mac, with no cloud step in the middle.

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Frequently asked questions

Do I need to know regular expressions to use it?

No. Leave the Regular Expression toggle off and a rule is a plain find & replace: Hi becomes Hello, and dots, brackets and dollar signs mean exactly themselves.

What happens if my regex has a mistake?

In the rule editor the preview goes blank and an inline error appears next to the pattern, so you see the problem on your sample text before the rule ever runs on real content. Fix the pattern and the preview comes back.

Can I run the same find & replace again later?

Yes. A saved rule is a menu item for as long as you keep it, and Recent at the top of the menu holds the ones you’ve just used — so running a rule again is one click.

Does it work line by line on multi-line text?

Yes — start the pattern with (?m), and ^ and $ mean the start and end of each line. Find (?m)^(.+)$ · Replace "$1" wraps every line in quotes: London / Paris / Berlin becomes "London" / "Paris" / "Berlin". Without (?m), ^ and $ match only the start and end of the whole text, so a per‑line rule does nothing on multi‑line input.