What is Clacky? The cozy Mac app, explained by the person who makes it

Clacky sits in the menu bar at the top of your screen. Click its icon and a window opens with four places along the top: My Kit, Sounds, Studio and Clackyland.

My Kit is the overview. Each tile is one thing Clacky does, with one switch: click sounds, scroll ticks, keyboard sounds, click ripples, the notch, the screen recorder, screenshots and Clackyland. Turn on what you like and close the window. Clacky keeps working in the background, in every app.

There are a few extra utilities folded away under More tools, off unless you switch them on. Most people never open it, and that's the point.

This is where Clacky started. Your Mac's trackpad and mouse are silent, so every click feels a little flat. Clacky plays a short, satisfying sound for each press, and a lighter one when the button comes back up.

• Click sounds: 37 of them in 8 families: Arena, Desk, Studio, Toybox, Tingle, Fidget, Analog and Spooky. Studio's are quiet enough to leave on while you record.
• Keyboard sounds: 29 in 9 families, from Cream (a deep, buttery thock) to Typewriter. They play on any keyboard, including the one built into your MacBook.
• Scroll ticks: a soft tick for every notch of scrolling, in 8 styles.

None of them are recordings. Each sound is built from noise and tones by a small synth, and no two clicks sound exactly the same, the way a real switch never does. You can try every click sound in the tool further down this page.

Keyboard sounds listen for key down/up only; Clacky never records, stores or sends which keys are typed, and it respects Secure Input.

If you've ever watched a screen recording and lost track of the mouse, this is for you. Clacky draws a ripple on your real screen, right under the pointer, every time you click.

Because it's on the screen itself, it shows up in any recorder: Clacky's own, the one built into macOS, QuickTime, Zoom, OBS. You pick the style (Ring, Double, Glow or Dot), the size, and a colour for the left button, the right button and the others. A thin dark edge keeps them readable on light and dark backgrounds.

I wrote a whole guide on this: how to show mouse clicks in a screen recording on a Mac.

Most screen recorders on a Mac don't record your Mac's own sound without extra setup. Clacky's does, so the click sounds end up in the video along with the ripples. Press Record, pick the whole screen, an area or a window, and you get a file in Movies › Clacky.

Then Edit a Video opens it: trim the ends, zoom in on what matters, and add captions made on your Mac from what you said. Exports come in the right shape and size for where the video is going (X, Reels, TikTok, YouTube), with an estimate of the file size before you export.

The recorder needs macOS 15 or later. If you're wondering how big your recordings will get, I measured that properly in How big is a screen recording on a Mac?

Screenshots have their own shortcuts: ⌥⇧⌘4 for an area and ⌥⇧⌘5 for a window. Scrolling Capture turns a long page into one tall image.

Edit a Picture is where a plain screenshot becomes something you'd post: arrows, boxes, text, highlights, a blur for anything private, and a frame on a soft background. The screenshot studio needs macOS 14 or later.

If you only want the frame, there's a free screenshot frame tool that runs in your browser.

This is the cozy part. Clackyland is a small painted harbour town where your Blip lives. As you use your Mac, your clicks bake cookies at the Cookie Factory. Cookies unlock new buildings, and new looks for your Blip in the Closet and the Bazaar. A streak counts the days you show up.

It's a game you play by working, and it never nags. There are no timers that punish you for a day off, and nothing you've earned disappears.

Your Blip also sits next to the notch at the top of your screen. Rest the pointer on it and you'll see which sounds are playing, with buttons to record or take a shot.

An app that hears your keyboard has to earn trust, so here it is plainly: keyboard sounds listen for key down/up only; Clacky never records, stores or sends which keys are typed, and it respects Secure Input. In a password field, nothing plays at all.

Your recordings and screenshots are saved on your Mac and never uploaded. Clacky goes online to check for updates, to activate your licence, to start the free trial once per Mac (with an anonymous ID, not your serial number), and to send anonymous usage counts, which you can switch off in Settings.

I wrote a longer post on how this works and how to check any app yourself: Do keyboard sound apps record what you type? The full list is on the privacy page.

Download Clacky and it just works for 7 days, with no card and no account. After that, pick one:

Clacky needs macOS 13 Ventura or later (the recorder macOS 15, the screenshot studio macOS 14). It's signed and notarized by Apple and sold only on clacky.app, through Polar, not the Mac App Store.

As for me: I'm Justinas, and I'm not a Swift developer. I build Clacky with an AI coding assistant, test every build on my own Mac, and ship small updates most weeks. When people tell me something is confusing, I fix it, which is how this simpler Clacky happened. If something bugs you, the feedback page reaches me directly.