The Case for Clipboard Managers
[Over] the two decades of modern macOS, Apple has addressed most of the basic needs of the average user. At the end of that process, I ended up discovering that the most glaring feature omission in all of macOS might just be its lack of a clipboard manager.
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Let me walk you through the reasons why non-nerds should care, why Apple should consider making this a built-in macOS feature, and what apps you should try out if you decide to go for it.
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Once you know that copying something to your clipboard doesn’t destroy what’s there, your use of the clipboard can become far more extensive. You lose the fear of wiping out something important, replaced with confidence that you can grab something in case you want it later and stash it away in the clipboard history.
The classic MacOS had the Scrapbook app, and since Mac OS X 10.0 we’ve had hidden, partial support via the kill ring, but Apple has never made this a real feature. I’ve been using LaunchBar’s Clipboard History feature for years, and it’s great. But it would be nice to have multiple clipboards on iOS, too, and Apple is in the unique position of being able to extend Universal Clipboard.
The lack of Mac-like clipboard management is one of the things I miss most from macOS when I work on my iPad. To give you an example: as I was putting together this post on Threads tonight with some tips I discovered, I realized I had to go back and double-check something else in the Threads app, so I copied my post (Threads doesn’t support saving as draft yet) and closed the composer UI. A few minutes later, I had already forgotten that my “draft” was stored in the clipboard, so I copied something else, and with no way to get my original text back from the iPadOS clipboard, I had to rewrite the post from scratch. That wouldn’t have happened if I was using macOS (or if Threads supported post drafts, but that’s a different story).
The clipboard management situation is even gloomier on iPadOS and iOS since, unlike the Mac, third-party apps can’t run with background privileges to monitor changes to your clipboard. Again, I don’t understand why Apple doesn’t want to make a modern API for this with all the necessary privacy controls for users. Because of these limitations, over the years I’ve seen the market for third-party iOS and iPadOS clipboard managers dry up.
Update (2023-12-19): Cabbage:
More indie apps don’t need to be Sherlocked
I think there would still be room for indie apps if Apple added OS support for multiple clipboards. My concern is that Apple would do it in a way that pulled the rug out from them.
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What Jason said. I can’t even phantom using a Mac without a clipboard manager, in my case Alfred with Power Pack. It is so extremely useful when you’re custom to it, and has saved me so many times.
Recently I started a new job where I had to use a PC and I thought I had to find a clipboard manager for Windows until I discovered that it’s built in on Windows! It’s a shame Microsoft beat Apple to such a truly useful function, not just for nerds but basically anyone who uses a computer (or phone or tablet of course) would benefit from it.
On iOS I use Clipboard https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/clipboard/id1597881414
I think iClip is the best clipboard manager ;^)
Also: If you've ever tried to copy something from a LibreOffice, you'll learn that it will indeed destroy something (https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=151679) :-D
Yep, I've said this for years (decades?). You don't have to use Keyboard Maestro for clipboard history, but you absolutely should use something for it otherwise you're forever living on the edge of data loss, not to mention unable to copy a name and email address/phone number/URL in one place and then paste both somewhere else without bouncing back and forth.
I have used forever ClipMenu or/and Clipy because it als has the possibility of using snippets. It still works under Sonoma, but doesn't show the tool tips on menu items. I mentioned that on github but apparently nobody is maintaining it anymore.
I also could not live without a clipboard manager anymore. I use Alfred for this, mostly because I have been a paying customer for years and the built in functionality fits my needs. Big bonus when pasting from Alfreds clipboard, you can set it up in such a way, that all text is autmatically stripped of all formatting. This is what I want in 99% of cases when I paste text somewhere. When I want formatting, I just use the built-in CMD-V.
I’m never more thrown out of sorts than when I discover my clipboard manager quietly crashed in the background and the last 5 minutes of history aren’t accessible. I don’t know how I ever did without one.
I'm a huge fan of clipboard managers, I think they're one of the most useful utilities out there. On the Mac, I use Maccy, which is featured well for my needs with a large history buffer, search, support for text and media clipboard data, etc https://maccy.app
I'd welcome a native clipboard manager that supported Universal Clipboard for using across the iOS/iPadOS/MacOS ecosystem. For the time being I use Notes app as basically a cross-device Scrapbook, but it's no replacement for an actual clipboard manager.
I use TextClippings by dragging text to the desktop. Not as elegant as having multiple clipboards, but one background task less to worry about. And it works on every Mac I service.
Some TextClippings are kept for repeated use, e.g. complex Terminal commands that don't warrant creation of an alias. Faster than opening a text file, highlighting the line, hitting command-c, switching to Terminal, hitting command-v. Just drag and drop.
While I have deep praise for Pastebot, which is itself the Lazarus-like successor to PTH Pasteboard (heck it still uses the PTHPasteboard.framework), I would still like to see Apple do something with clipboards. Even Scrapbook was useful in its clunky sort of way. Indie devs will do it better than Apple's half-hearted and usually killed off attempts. One only needs to look at all 10 (11?) comments here and how many different apps have been mentioned.
Apple's solution would not bother with multiple clipboards, tons of programmable keyboard shortcuts, or even filters (let alone REGEX filters). I have recently discovered I like having a second clipboard manager running in tandem with Pastebot. That distinction goes to Unclutter, which of its three reasons for existing one is simple clipboard manager.
There is room for improvement in this space too! I recently switched computers at home and at work and discovered there was no way to export all the filters and clipboards from Pastebot. One machine used iCloud and one did not. Of course iCloud is a bit of a stillbirth so while I assumed that the iCloud data would overwrite the local data, the reverse happened. This left me picking through the guts of Pasteboard to figure out where the iCloud data was stored in a back up and recover years of passwords, server addresses, ssh logins, and such (yeah, yeah, now that stuff is in a password manager too). It was a mess and not everything could be found.
The first clipboard management app that does everything Pasteboard does and allows for easy export/import of all the clipboards and filters is the one to get Pasteboard's lunch ... as long as that app has a long history.
