# Using Pinit > How to pin things with Pinit, work with stickers, restore your board, use the history, keyboard shortcuts and the pinit:// URL scheme. ## 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. ```sh 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. --- Canonical: https://pinit.kopit.app/guide Markdown: https://pinit.kopit.app/guide.md