Statuses

Every clip has one status. It is your call, and it decides which shelf the clip is on.

A card shows its status as a pill at the top corner. Ready is the settled state, so it is the one status a card does not show.

Approve with one key

Select one or more clips and press ⌘R, or choose Edit › Mark as Ready. The clips move to the Library. Reviewing a row of drafts is ↓, ⌘R, ↓, ⌘R.

In a clip window ⌘R marks the open clip Ready.

Any direction

The status dropdown in the inspector, and Status in the context menu, set Draft, Ready or Archived on the selection. Nothing is deleted by a status change. An archived clip keeps its tags and highlights and comes back with one pick.

There is no menu item for New. A clip is New only until anything about it changes. To put a clip back to New, use Reset.

Reset

Reset… is in the context menu and in the inspector's menu. It removes every tag, value, the name, the description and the highlights, and takes back any AI request. The dialog offers two ways out:

• Reset and Set to New: the clip is as it was right after import.
• Reset, Keep Status: the clip is emptied but stays where it is.

Reset cannot be undone. The file is not touched.

The AI never changes a status

AI tagging fills a clip. Its only effect on status is that a New clip becomes a Draft when the answer lands. It never marks a clip Ready or Archived, and it never touches a manual property. Approval is yours.

What the AI is doing to a clip is a separate axis: nothing, pending, in progress, or failed. It shows as a purple pill on the card, in the inspector's AI box, in the sidebar's progress dial, and as the AI status condition in a filter. See AI tagging.

The count of decisions left

The In Progress pill is the number of clips still waiting on you. A new library opens on In Progress for that reason. Once the Library holds a clip, the app opens there.

The command line sets statuses too: betterlibrary clips set <id> --status ready. See The command line.