615: The Clipboard Manager Roundup

My weapon of choice for clipboard management on macOS is Keyboard Maestro.

Here are two timesaving clipboard tricks (macros) I used several times a day:

Paste Quoted Text

This trims the whitespace from the current clipboard and pastes it wrapped in quotes. I have various flavors of this for the different quote characters. For example if I have “ abc “ in my clipboard, I can type a trigger string to invoke the behavior:

“cb → it pastes “abc”
‘cb → it pastes ‘abc’
`cb → it pastes `abc`

This is very useful when working on the command line.

Paste URL

This pastes the most recent URL found in the clipboard history. That’s it. It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s very helpful. “Just give me the URL I copied I few minutes ago.”

6 Likes

Tried Paste for the first time as I already have Setapp. So far it’s working great for me.

2 Likes

Pastepal is on offer today for 2.99 (was 13.99) was a new one on me and looks interesting

https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/pastepal-clipboard-manager/id1503446680

Another experiment occurred to me yesterday:

  1. Copy a “marker” string to the clipboard. “XYZZY” would do nicely. :slight_smile:
  2. Copy some items to the clipboard.
  3. Sort everything copied after “XYZZY” back to the clipboard (or to somewhere else. Possibly a draft with a Markdown bulleted list.

So using the clipboard history as a buffer / stack.

To me clipboard history is the simplest transient storage going.

I might just do this this weekend.

I’ve got this to work with Keyboard Maestro - including a limit on the number of entries.

I don’t know if this is of any interest to anyone.

1 Like

I use it as temporary storage really. I find I never need anything beyond what the Keyboard Maestro clipboard has as default. Nice idea though.

1 Like

I subscribed to Setapp a few weeks ago and downloaded Paste. It’s my first clipboard manager, and it’s the right fit. Thanks for the episode and this discussion!

1 Like

I just tried the background trick in Yoink.

When I heard about it first, I dismissed it because I thought the picture-in-picture window would get in the way, particularly on the iPhone.

I did not realize you can minimize that PiP window so it no longer gets in the way. Even on the iPhone.

Holy cow, that’s amazing! Fills a need that’s been annoying me since I first started using the iPhone in 2007.

1 Like

I used to use Yoink too but switched over to Dropzone 4 as it has more functions on the mac. The down side is that DZ4 does not talk to IOS :sleepy:

I find that Mac/iOS syncing is a thing I thought I needed, but it turns out to be something I almost never use.

I can use Universal Clipboard to copy-and-paste between devices, and if that doesn’t work, there are plenty of other tools.

2 Likes

I’ve a specific cut and paste requirement and would appreciate a recommendation from a cut and paste expert!

I am cutting and pasting extracts from a series of ebooks and articles. After each paste I want to quickly paste a text citation so I can remember which book the extract came from. Right now I’m having to repeatedly cut the citation text from a text file after every time I paste an extract… which gets a bit dull after 30 extracts from the same book. It would be nice if I could just paste the citation text using a repeatable keyboard shortcut.

Hope that makes sense. Tl;dr: I want to paste the same piece of text repeatedly after having cut and paste another piece of text.

I’m not 100% sure I understand exactly what you need (do you need to automatically pull the citation?), but a few possibilities:

  • I am attaching a screenshot of the settings in Copy 'Em to the bottom of this post. You’ll notice there is an “Append text” setting. Not sure if that will do what you want or not. And, as I re-read this, I realize I need to go learn what that setting does. :crazy_face:

  • use text expansion software (or the built in text replacement) to set up shortcuts for your citation(s)

  • if you can copy the text, and then copy the citation, both Alfred and LaunchBar have a keyboard shortcut which lets you append one clipboard item to the previous clipboard item (so, for example, I could copy the word “blue” and then select the word “red,” and hit Command-C twice in a row, and my clipboard would then have “blue red” on it.

Here is the Copy 'Em screenshot I mentioned above:

1 Like

Thank you! Great ideas. I didn’t even consider using the text replacement option within MacOS so set up a shortcut. It’ll see if that works - it should do as I’m working with one document at a time so it’s the same citation repeated over and over.

Much appreciated. The other options look great too for other work I’m doing.

Edit: actually Copy’em with append text, if it works as expected, would be so frictionless as to be awesome. Going to try that :grinning:

1 Like

Hello, I know this topic is old but if possible will like to see if stuff has changed and maybe talk about it. I see Pastebot is 12.99 on the App Store and it seems a bit expensive for what it does (no disrespect intended). The only thing I need is at least the last 10 from my clipboard, no need to sync bt nothing, 1 MacBook. Any ideas?

Alfred Clipboard History is great, plus you get all the other great features of Alfred!

Clipboard History - Alfred Help and Support

There are so many programms having a clipboard manager as part of their feature set, that you don’t need a dedicated one, if you want a Spotlight alternative like Launchbar, Raycast or Alfred, they have that. I think Yoink has that to. BetterTouchToll has it and Keyboard Maestro as well.

Clipbpard management seems to be such a missing basic feature that many throw it on top of their offering, suggesting it should be an OS feature, really.

Take a look at this thread to: Copy And Paste Apps - #4 by Swifferdusterrr

1 Like

Thank you. PastePal is everything I need.

1 Like

I understand. However I do not like to install tools that I really do not use. Based on @Swifferdusterrr post I found PastePal and it is 100% what I need. Thank you for your input.

1 Like

I have tried most of them. Copy 'Em is the most advanced.