I find myself reaching for the dropdown clipboard in the Unclutter App most often, because it’s always in the same place above the current active window. I’m a pretty visual thinker and, in my mind, the clipboard just “lives up there” and I reach up and pull recent items down from that shelf when I need them. It seems pretty rudimentary but it works for my needs (mostly I just need a quick list of recent clipboard items).
…I should add I use Alfred’s a lot because I live there already. But, I have always been a clipboard hoarder and I like the cross platform access (Paste).
I also use the Universal Clipboard… and Drafts… and I have Unclutterer syncing via Dropbox…
I use ClipMenu. It hasn’t been updated for years but still works with Catalina. I also have CopyPaste Pro, but find it unwieldy (although I liked its OS 9 predecessor). My main criterion for a clipboard manager is that items are numbered so that they can be selected from the keyboard.
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I just want macOS to have its own clipboard manager. I love how the clipboard manager works in Windows and it would improve my macOS experience by a lot. Not a real answer to your question, but just pressing WIN + V and using the arrow keys makes life so much easier.
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I use Alfred and find it fits all my needs.
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I wonder why there is a need for clipboard managers?
The clipboard seems like an ephemeral place where a thing can be copied “in transit” from one application (or device) to another. If there is a need to save these items, I would think another app dedicated to doing so would be more suitable. E.g. Snipper (just the first thing I found), Drafts, etc. which would provide organization, search, etc.
Ease of use, less clicks.
Also sometimes you might not realise you’ve lost our clipboard or don’t plan on needing it again.
It’s an easy hassle free ‘backup’
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My two use cases:
- I need to copy multiple items to a single destination (a quote from a webpage and it’s URL, for instance). The clipboard manager keeps me from having to make multiple round trips.
- Pasting plain text.
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On iPadOS I’m really liking the new version of Yoink that uses Picture in Picture to run in the background.
Here’s one way I use it. I get, say emails from various composers with song titles I need to put into Excel. I open email 1, copy song title, email 2, copy title…through all the emails. Switch to excel, type ⌥+⌘+C (call up Alfred Clipboard), ⌘1 (this will paste the first copy) ↓ (move to next cell), ⌥+⌘+C, ⌘2, arrow down and so on as many times as I need to to fill in the song titles. So much faster than copy, switch to excel and paste, return to email…
Alfred makes this so simple. I would add that once you start using it, you wonder why it isn’t part of the OS.
Also, sometimes you copied something yesterday or 2 days ago and forgot where you found it, or maybe a simple thing you didn’t think you needed again. But your email didn’t go through, or someone else would like the link or need it again… right there in the clipboard.
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Fwiw, I do this with a key press, which gives me the markdown-formatted
- [page title](url/to/page)
> selected text as quote
from any browser I use. Pretty sure it’s in Keyboard Maestro. Of course you could change the formatting to whatever works for you.
This is even useful if I’m pasting into a non-Markdown document — all the pieces are there, and I’ve gotten pretty quick at cutting the url, highlighting the title and Cmd-K Enter to embed the link (works in most apps); I have another key press to do all that automatically, but I never remember what it is.
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If you wanted to get super fancy, I believe there is a PopClip extension to append-to-clipboard.
You might be able to copy all the song names using that, then just paste once and get a column of songs in Sheets or Excel (both of which usually interpret a newline separated list as a series of cells arranged vertically). I may depend whether there are newlines in the copied text; it’s been a while since I used it.
If you need the songs in something other than a column, you could probably create a Keyboard Maestro macro to append each item to the clipboard in the right configuration.
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Yeah - thanks. I am sure there are a lot of fancy ways to do this. I could do a KM script, but at this point, and for the amount I do at a time, my muscle memory doing copy and paste with Alfred works really well.
I have never really found PopClip all that useful, truthfully. Perhaps I haven’t given it a fair shake, but it doesn’t really appeal to me on first try. Maybe it’s the same thing as a clipboard manager.
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+1 for Alfred, which works well for content, especially tracking numbers to Deliveries and Parcel apps. Since I stopped using Google Translate also use Alfred to get message text to AE Mate for translation,
Sometimes I bypass the clipboard by jumping directly to an app using a PopClip extension.
For file management, I use Path Finder which has a Drop Stack function
I think Curiota might be my new “clipboard manager”.
It can be set to float above other windows, and multiple things can be pasted in, such as @kayle mentioned above.
Adding to Chris’s list: Almost everything I save to the clipboard manager will be used again within the hour. If I need things more permanently then, yes, I will store it elsewhere.
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I have moved my clipboard history and text expansions out of Keyboard Maestro and into Alfred which has a more beautiful and modern look to their user interface. Alfred gives full context with each clip and is more flexible in how long stuff should be kept. I still have a couple dozen hotkey-triggered macros in Keyboard Maestro because I haven’t wrapped my brain around Alfred workflows (yet).
Totally the same here. I’ll load it up like a buffer than just make one trip from my browser to whatever app I’m working in
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Copy’em
I find that I use Clipboard Managers to store various text bits with sources because I find myself inputting references and quotes from History. Thus I need a great way to manage clips and an iOS keyboard is a must for flying the text in. The biggest thing I miss about Copied that Copy’em and PastePal don’t do is allow you to search text in the iOS keyboard.
Same here, if I understand you and @ChrisUpchurch correctly.
Some clipboard managers have queuing options, where you can load a sequence of strings into the app and then paste them in the same sequence by pressing a keyboard shortcut—for example, Cmd-Opt-V—repeatedly.
I have never gotten in the habit of that.
But I’ll load Copy ‘em in the browser with a web page title and URL, then flip to another app or window and paste them into Devonthink, Drafts, or social media.
Also, on the iPad and iPhone, I often share memes and other found internet images on social media. In that case, I copy the image, URL, and description into Copy ‘em, then share from Copy ‘em to Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. Same for articles, headlines, descriptions and comments.
The social links are in my profile, by the way. Follow me if you want to, don’t if you don’t. No pressure.