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.”
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!
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.
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:
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
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?
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.
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.