User guide

Using Pinit

Everything Pinit does, on one page. Skim the headings, or jump in from the list.

Getting started

Open the disk image, drag Pinit to Applications, and open it. Pinit lives in the menu bar as a small pin. The first time it starts it opens its main window, which lists the ways to pin something — the quickest is to copy anything and press ⌃⌥P.

Pinit does not ask for any permissions, and you will not see a prompt from macOS. The edition from this site adds itself to your login items the first time it runs, so your stickers are back after a restart; turn that off under Settings › General.

Menu Bar Only: The default. A pin in the menu bar, no Dock icon, not in ⌘Tab.
Menu Bar and Dock: Both. Clicking the Dock icon opens the main window; right-click it for quick actions; drop files on it to pin them.
Dock Only: No menu bar icon, useful if your menu bar is full. The setting is under Settings › General › Show Pinit in.

Pinning things

Every way in ends the same way: a sticker near the pointer, above every window. Several items at once become several stickers, fanned out so none hides another.

The clipboard — ⌃⌥P: Pins whatever you last copied: an image, text, a link, or the files you copied in Finder. Also in the menu as Pin Clipboard.
Drag to the menu bar pin: Drop files, images, links or selected text on the pin. On macOS 26 a small “Drop to pin” card opens under the icon as you arrive — let go on the icon or on the card.
Drag into the main window: Drop anything anywhere in the window; it pins, and the window switches to Desktop.
Open With and the Dock: In Finder, right-click a file › Open With › Pinit, or drop it on Pinit's Dock icon. Pinit never makes itself the default app for anything.
Services menu: Select text, an image or a link in any app and choose Services › Pin with Pinit. For files selected in Finder, choose Services › Pin Files with Pinit.
Pin File…: Choose one or more files from an open panel. ⌘O while Pinit is in front.
Pin Web Page…: Type or paste an address. If the clipboard holds a link, it is already filled in. ⌘↩ pins.
New Text Sticker…: Write a note. If what you type is a single web address, the button changes and it pins as a web page instead.
The terminal: open -a Pinit report.pdf pins any file you name.

What each kind of sticker does

Pinit decides how to show something from what it is, not from where it came from. A PNG dragged from Finder and a PNG copied from a browser become the same image sticker.

Images: PNG, JPEG, HEIC, TIFF, WebP, GIF and APNG (animated), plus PSD, AVIF, camera RAW, JPEG 2000, OpenEXR, TGA, ICNS and SVG. Zoom, rotate, flip, mark up, select text and translate.
Text: Plain and rich text, HTML from the clipboard, text files and source code. Editable in place, with its own font size.
PDF: An inline PDF viewer. Double-click to scroll and page through; Esc to go back.
Documents: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, RTF, OpenDocument, web archives, fonts and 3D files preview through Quick Look, in the same two modes as a PDF.
Web pages: A live WebKit view. Double-click to interact with the page; Esc to go back to moving the sticker.
Video and audio: Video loops muted with a play bar. Audio shows a waveform. Space plays and pauses.
Other files and folders: A card with a Quick Look thumbnail, the name, kind and size. Double-click opens the file in its own app.

Working with stickers

Stickers float above normal windows and never take over the menu bar, so the app you are working in stays in charge. Click a sticker to give it the keyboard; the keys below apply to the sticker in front.

Opacity is worth knowing about. ⌘-scroll fades a sticker so you can read through it. At 0% it lets clicks through to whatever is underneath — handy for tracing or comparing — and holding ⌘ brings it back into view so you can grab it again.

Move: Drag anywhere on the sticker, or nudge it with the arrow keys (⇧ for 10 points at a time).
Resize and zoom: Pull an edge, scroll, pinch, or press + and −. 1 returns to 100%.
Opacity: ⌘-scroll. O returns to 100%. The starting opacity for new stickers is under Settings › Stickers.
Rotate and flip: R rotates by 90°, H flips horizontally, V vertically (images).
Shadow: S turns the sticker's shadow on or off.
Copy and save: ⌘C copies the sticker's content. ⌘S saves an image sticker to a file.
Close: Esc, ⌫ or ⌘W. Closed stickers stay in History, and Reopen Closed Sticker (⌘⇧T) brings back the last one.
Hide everything: ⌃H on any sticker, or Hide or Show All Stickers in the menu. Press it again to bring them all back.
Right-click: Every action above, plus the ones that have no key.

Mark-up, text and translation

Press Return on an image sticker to annotate it where it is: arrows, rectangles, highlighter, numbered steps, text and mosaic. Return or the tick saves; Esc throws the changes away. The annotated image replaces the sticker and survives a restart.

On a text sticker, Return starts editing and ⌘↩ finishes.

E turns on text selection inside an image, using Live Text: drag across words and ⌘C copies them. T translates the text in the image and lays the translation over the original. Recognition and translation both run on your Mac; translation needs macOS 15 or later, and the first use of a language pair may download Apple's language files.

The board: stickers that survive a restart

Pinit saves your stickers as you go — after every pin and close, and every few seconds while you move things around. When it starts again, it puts each sticker back where it was, as it was: position, size, zoom, opacity, rotation and flips, hidden or not, the text you edited and the marks you drew.

It saves where things come from rather than copies of them: the path of a file, the address of a page, the text of a note. Only images with no file behind them — a pasted screenshot, an image you annotated — are kept as copies. So if you move or delete a file, that sticker is skipped next time instead of reappearing empty. A sticker whose display is gone comes back on the main screen.

To start clean every time, turn off Settings › Stickers › Restore stickers at launch.

Main window, history and favorites

Open the main window with ⌃⌥L, with Open Pinit… in the menu, or by clicking the Dock icon. Switch pages with ⌘1, ⌘2 and ⌘3. The toolbar's Pin button covers every way to pin, and the search field filters by name and by the text inside a sticker.

Desktop: What is pinned right now. Locate finds a sticker for you — it unhides it, brings a faded one back to full opacity, moves it to the main screen if its display is gone — and flashes its outline.
History: Everything you have pinned, grouped by day. Pin Again puts a closed sticker back with its last position, size and opacity. Only pins are recorded, never the clipboard.
Favorites: Star an entry in History to keep it here. Favorites never expire.
Keyboard: ↑ and ↓ to select, Return to locate or pin again, ⌘⌫ to close or remove, ⌘F to search, Esc to clear the search.

History keeps entries for 30 days by default. Change it to 1 week, 90 days or forever under Settings › Stickers › Keep for, or turn history off. Stickers on the desktop and favorites are never cleaned up.

Keyboard shortcuts

Global shortcuts work from any app. Out of the box only two have keys; give the others one under Settings › Shortcuts. If a shortcut is already taken by another app, the menu says so next to the item.

⌃⌥P: Pin Clipboard (global).
⌃⌥L: Show Main Window (global).
No key by default: Pin File…, New Text Sticker…, Hide or Show All Stickers and Reopen Closed Sticker (global — assign your own).
⌘N · ⌘O · ⌘L: New text sticker · pin a file · pin a web page (while Pinit is in front).
⌘⇧V · ⌘⇧T: Pin the clipboard · reopen the closed sticker.
⌘0 · ⌘Y · ⌘,: Main window · History · Settings.

Automation: the pinit:// URL scheme

Open these links from anywhere — the Open URLs action in the Shortcuts app, a Raycast or Alfred command, or open in the terminal. Remember to percent-encode text: a space is %20.

There is no way to pin a file by link, on purpose: any web page can fire a URL scheme. Use drag and drop, Open With, the Services menu or open -a Pinit for files. The url parameter accepts only http and https addresses.

pinit://pin?url=…: Pin a web page.
pinit://pin?text=…: Pin text. A lone web address pins as a page.
pinit://clipboard: Pin the clipboard.
pinit://new: Open the New Text Sticker box.
pinit://toggle: Hide or show every sticker.
pinit://reopen: Reopen the last closed sticker.
pinit://open · history · favorites: Open the main window on that page.

open "pinit://pin?url=https://example.com"

Settings

Settings opens from the menu bar pin, or with ⌘, while Pinit is in front.

General: Where Pinit shows itself (menu bar, Dock or both), launch at login, appearance, language and, in the download edition, automatic update checks.
Stickers: Default opacity and shadow for new stickers, restoring stickers at launch, and history: on or off, how long to keep it, and Clear History.
Shortcuts: Set, change or clear the six global shortcuts.
About: Version, a link to this site and the privacy policy.

Troubleshooting

The pin is not in the menu bar: On macOS 26, check System Settings › Menu Bar and allow Pinit there. On any version, a crowded menu bar can hide icons behind the notch — switch to Menu Bar and Dock, or Dock Only, under Settings › General.
A shortcut does nothing: Another app may already own it; the menu marks the item as unavailable. Choose different keys under Settings › Shortcuts.
Pinching zooms the app underneath too: Expected. Without Accessibility access, Pinit cannot stop a pinch from also reaching the window below. The sticker still zooms correctly; scrolling, + and − do not have this side effect.
A sticker did not come back after a restart: Its file was moved, renamed or deleted, so Pinit skipped it rather than show something empty. Find the entry in History; once the file is back where it was, Pin Again works.
I cannot find a sticker: Open the main window, find it under Desktop and press Locate. It is unhidden, brought back to full opacity and outlined.

Uninstalling

Quit Pinit from its menu and move Pinit from Applications to the Bin. That is all the app itself needs.

Your stickers, history and their image copies live in ~/Library/Application Support/app.kopit.pinit (the Mac App Store edition keeps them in ~/Library/Containers/app.kopit.pinit). Delete that folder to remove them too. If launch at login was on, the login item goes away with the app.