The basic flow

Getting suggestions

There are three ways. They all produce the same suggestions.

Select text

Select text in another app and suggestions for it appear in the top-right corner. Dragging with the mouse, double-clicking, ⇧+arrow keys and ⌘A all count. This route needs Accessibility permission.

Copy with ⌘C

In apps where selecting produces nothing, copy the text with ⌘C instead. Pluck reads the clipboard and shows the same suggestions. This route works without the permission.

If you select and then press ⌘C, the suggestions appear once, not twice.

Type it with ⌃⌘I

Press ⌃⌘I and a small typing window opens near the top of the screen, centred. "Type Text…" in the menu bar menu does the same. Use it for text that isn't written down anywhere yet — a ticket key or a URL you have in your head — so there is nothing to select or copy.

Suggestions appear as you type. There is nothing to confirm (return inserts a line break). Each time you pause, the suggestions are rebuilt from what's in the field.

Your keystrokes go to the typing window, but the app in front doesn't change. Running a suggestion works as it does elsewhere: ⌃+number or a click. Running one closes the typing window and your keystrokes go back to the app you were in. The suggestions stay.

To close the typing window, press esc, press ⌃⌘I again, or click outside it. esc and a second ⌃⌘I also close the suggestions the typing produced.

While the typing window is open, selecting and copying produce no suggestions — otherwise the ⇧+arrow keys and ⌘C you press while typing would count as a selection or a copy. Closing it restores both. Opening it closes the suggestions on screen; pinned ones stay.

If no rule matches, the window says "No enabled rule matches this text." Text over 4,000 characters gets a message the same way. Neither closes the window.

While Pluck is paused, the typing window doesn't open either.

Reading the panel

Suggestions appear in the top-right corner of the display the mouse pointer is on. The panel doesn't take focus, so you can keep typing in the app you were using.

Suggestions stack vertically, in the order of your rules in Settings. Pinned suggestions come first. If they don't fit on screen, the list scrolls.

Each suggestion shows:

• the rule's icon and name
• the matched text, shortened in the middle if it's long
• its shortcut number
• a pin button, and an × that closes just that suggestion

Running a suggestion

Click it, or press ⌃ and its number. Numbers run from the top: ⌃1, ⌃2, up to ⌃0 for the tenth.

There are ten numbers. An eleventh suggestion gets none, but stays in the list and can be clicked. If another app already uses one of these shortcuts, that number isn't shown.

What happens depends on the kind of action: open a URL, run a web search, copy to the clipboard, run a command, or show a translation. See Actions and recipes for each.

Closing suggestions

• Press esc. Everything on screen closes
• Click outside the panel. Same thing
• Press ×. Only that suggestion closes
• Select or copy something else. The list is replaced

In every case, pinned suggestions stay.

When the same suggestions don't come back

If you close the panel and immediately select the same text again, nothing appears for a while. This stops the same suggestions from popping up over and over. To bring them back straight away, reselect with the keyboard: ⇧+arrow keys or ⌘A.

Pinning

Press ⇧⌃+number, or click the pin button on a suggestion. A pinned suggestion survives esc, clicks outside the panel, and new selections. To close it, press × or ⇧⌃+number again.

Pinned suggestions move to the top of the list and the numbers are reassigned from there.

While pinned, three actions behave differently: Copy, Translate and Replace All paste at your cursor instead of copying to the clipboard, which saves a step when you're carrying something into another app. Open URL, Web Search and Run Command work the same pinned or not.

If you unpin within a few seconds of pinning, the suggestion returns to the normal list instead of closing. Unpinning later closes it.

Images

Take a screenshot, or copy an image from a browser, and a single suggestion with a thumbnail appears. It arrives already pinned. Press it to paste the image at your cursor.

Pinned images have a total size limit. Past it, further images aren't pinned and the panel says so. Close images you're done with using ×.

If you don't want image suggestions, turn off the "Paste image" rule in Settings. Pluck then stops reading images from the clipboard.

Pausing

Press ⌃⌘C to pause Pluck. "Pause Pluck" in the menu bar menu does the same. Use it when you don't want suggestions for a while, during a screen share for example.

• No suggestions appear, from selections or from the clipboard
• The typing window doesn't open either. ⌃⌘I does nothing, and "Type Text…" in the menu bar menu is greyed out. If it's already open when you pause, it closes, along with the suggestions your typing produced
• A small badge appears in the top-right corner, and the menu bar icon dims
• If you quit Pluck while paused, it starts paused next time. The badge is there so you notice

To resume, press ⌃⌘C again or click the badge.

When nothing appears

Check these in order.

1. Is the pause badge showing in the top-right corner? Click it to resume.
2. Does copying with ⌘C work? If copying produces suggestions but selecting doesn't, Accessibility permission isn't granted. Choose "Check Accessibility permission" from the menu bar menu and switch Pluck on in System Settings. Some apps never expose their selection at all, even with the permission granted — editors that draw their text themselves, or transcript panes whose lines are built as buttons. Use ⌘C in those.
3. Does any rule match? Pluck shows nothing when there are no suggestions. To get something for any text, keep a rule with an empty match condition enabled, such as "Search selection" or "Copy".
4. Is the text too long? All three routes handle up to 4,000 characters. Selecting a whole document with ⌘A falls outside that.
5. Did it come from a password manager? Content copied as concealed is never shown.
6. Has the trial ended? If so, a purchase prompt appears in place of suggestions.

If none of that explains it, ~/Library/Application Support/Pluck/debug.log records what happened. It never contains the text you selected or copied, only lengths and app names.