Tacet Support
Stuck or curious? Email hello@papermint.studio and a human reads every message, usually within a day.
Getting started3
- Install. Download Tacet, open the .dmg and drag Tacet to Applications. It needs macOS 14 Sonoma or later, on Apple silicon or Intel.
- The welcome. Four short steps: what Tacet does, letting it paste where you were (Accessibility), your terminals, and a made-up GitHub token to copy so you can watch Tacet hush it.
- The menu bar. Tacet waits in the menu bar with your last few copies and how many secrets it hushed today. Start with your Mac is in Settings › General.
Finding a copy4
- ⌃⌥V in any app opens the copy finder. Type to search, then press return or click Paste: the copy lands in the app you were in. Pick another shortcut (⌃⌘V, ⇧⌘V or ⌥⌘V) in Settings › Finding copies.
- What it keeps. Text, links, images and files. Pin the ones you keep using; pinned copies stay until you unpin them.
- The Clipboard page lists everything by day, with a search field and filters for Hushed, Links, Images, Files and Pinned. Forget all… clears the history and keeps your pins.
- How long. Copies are kept for a month and hushed secrets for a day, unless you choose otherwise in Settings › Clipboard (from a day to always).
Hushed secrets7
- What counts as a secret. More than 300 kinds of API keys and tokens (327 patterns from gitleaks and Nosey Parker), plus private keys, JWTs, database URLs with a password in them, Authorization headers, .env lines and random-looking tokens. Anything copied from a password manager counts too.
- What hushing does. Tacet rewrites the copy with the marker from nspasteboard.org, so clipboard apps that respect it, such as Raycast, Alfred, Paste, Maccy and Copy 'Em, leave it out of their history. Pasting it works as usual.
- Wiped after 60 seconds. A hushed secret is taken off the clipboard after 60 seconds, but only if it's still there: anything you copied since is left alone. Choose 30 s, 2 min or Never in Settings › Hushing.
- The corner card. When something is hushed, a small card shows what it was, where you copied it and the countdown, with Stay 5 min, Wipe and Copy without keys. Turn it off with Corner card in Settings.
- Peek. Hushed copies stay dotted out in your history. Peek, or pasting one again from Tacet, asks for Touch ID or your Mac password. Turn that off with Touch ID before a peek or a paste.
- Token peek. A peeked JWT shows its issuer, audience, scopes and time left, read on your Mac; a private key shows its type and size. A JWT's time left shows even without a peek.
- Something isn't a secret? Or a secret wasn't caught? Write to us with the kind of key (never the key itself) and we'll look at the pattern.
Overheard4
- What it shows. Apps in the background that read the clipboard while a hushed secret was on it. Tacet learns this from macOS's own clipboard log, read on your Mac.
- Looked away or may have kept it. An app that saw the hushed marker and left the secret out is shown in green. One that doesn't look for the marker is shown in red: it may have kept a copy, so change that key.
- Change it. Change it at Stripe → (or GitHub, OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS and 40 more) opens the page where that key is made again. Press I've changed it when you're done.
- Old keys. Tacet keeps a salted fingerprint of each key, never the key, and on Today points out keys still in use after 90 days. Pick 30 or 180 days, or Off, in Settings › Hushing › Nudge me about old keys.
Pasting and sharing4
- Ask before pasting. Press ⌘V with a hushed key on the clipboard in Slack, Discord, Messages, Mail, ChatGPT, Claude and other chat, mail and AI apps, and Tacet asks first: Paste anyway, Don't paste or Always paste here. Choose the apps in Settings › Before pasting, or add your own. It catches ⌘V only, not Edit › Paste or a right-click.
- Copy without the keys. When a key sits inside a log, a config or a command, the corner card offers Copy without keys: the rest is copied with each key replaced by a placeholder such as <STRIPE_SECRET_KEY>.
- This Mac only. With Keep hushed keys on this Mac on (the default), Universal Clipboard doesn't hand them to your iPhone or iPad. Everything else still travels.
- Paste once. Wipe right after the first paste clears a key as soon as it has been pasted, instead of waiting for the timer. You can also choose it for one key at a time.
Terminals and shell history5
- Keep new keys out. On the Terminals page, switch on each shell you use: zsh, bash, fish, Nushell, PowerShell or xonsh. A command holding a key is then not saved to history. It takes effect in new terminal windows.
- What a switch changes. It adds one marked line to that shell's startup file (such as ~/.zshrc), which loads a small hook from ~/.config/tacet/hooks. The hook asks tacet-check, a small program inside Tacet, whether a command holds a secret. Nothing leaves your Mac.
- Remove a hook. Switch the shell off on the Terminals page and Tacet takes its line out again. A shell shown as partly set up can be repaired by switching it off and on.
- Sweep out old keys. Look for secrets reads 27 kinds of history files: zsh, bash, fish, Nushell and xonsh, and Python, IPython, Node, irb, psql, MySQL, SQLite, redis-cli and mongosh. Pick the entries to remove and press Remove from history….
- Backed up first. Every file is copied to Tacet's backups before an entry is taken out, and Undo last removal puts it back. Close other terminal windows first: an open shell can write its history back when it exits.
Permissions3
- Accessibility is the one permission Tacet asks for. It lets Tacet press ⌘V for you so a picked copy lands in the app you were in, and lets Ask before pasting notice ⌘V. Without it, picking a copy just copies it and you paste yourself.
- Turn it on in System Settings › Privacy & Security › Accessibility, or from Allow… in Tacet's Settings. If it's on but pasting doesn't work, turn it off and on again, then quit and reopen Tacet.
- Touch ID is asked for only when you peek at or paste a hushed secret.
Where your history lives3
- One sealed file. Your history is one file in ~/Library/Application Support/Tacet, locked with AES-256. Its key sits in your login Keychain, so the file is unreadable anywhere else. Show in Finder is in Settings › Clipboard.
- Backups of history files Tacet cleaned are in ~/Library/Application Support/Tacet/Backups.
- Why can't I see Tacet in my screen recording? Tacet's windows are left out of screen sharing, calls and recordings on purpose, so a key you peek at never ends up in a video. Turn off Invisible to screen sharing in Settings › Privacy if you want to show Tacet itself.
Buying and licences8
- Try it first. Everything works for 7 days from the first launch.
- Pay once. $9.99 for one Mac, or $19.99 for up to three, with every future update included. Buy from Settings › Licence; the payment is handled by Dodo Payments.
- After the trial your history and the copy finder still work. Hushing secrets needs a licence.
- Activating. After checkout Tacet opens with your key filled in; press Activate. Or paste the key from the Dodo Payments email into Settings › Licence.
- Moving to another Mac. Press Deactivate… in Settings on the old Mac, or remove that Mac at console.papermint.studio, then activate on the new one. Reinstalling on the same Mac doesn't take another place.
- All your licences are at console.papermint.studio (also Tacet › Manage Licences…): your keys, the Macs each is on, and your receipts.
- Refunds. Ask from your receipt at console.papermint.studio or through the Dodo Payments email, or write to hello@papermint.studio.
- Offline is fine. The licence is checked about once a day when the Mac is online, and Tacet keeps working for 30 days without a connection.
Updates3
- Automatic. Tacet checks for a new version about once a day and installs it when you choose; your history and settings stay as they were.
- Check now from Tacet › Check for Updates… or Settings › Updates.
- Signed updates. Every update is signed by us and notarized by Apple, and Tacet refuses anything that isn't.
Removing Tacet4
- First, the shell hooks. On the Terminals page, switch off every shell you switched on, so the lines Tacet added to your startup files are taken out.
- Then the app. Quit Tacet from its menu bar menu and drag it from Applications to the Trash.
- Your history, if you want it gone too: delete ~/Library/Application Support/Tacet (the sealed history and backups) and ~/.config/tacet, and the "studio.papermint.tacet" item in Keychain Access.
- Your licence stays yours. Deactivate this Mac first, or remove it later at console.papermint.studio, to use the place on another Mac.