Apple’s Spotlight Clipboard Manager
Spotlight got a major overhaul, and you can now use it to do just about anything on your Mac. It supports actions, so you can send emails and messages without ever opening up an app. Spotlight also incorporates a list of all of your apps plus a clipboard manager that keeps track of what you’ve copied and pasted. You can get to Spotlight’s features with the Command Key and 1, 2, 3, or 4, and you can launch actions with short little phrases like SE for send email.
It seems like there’s no way to open the clipboard history with a single keyboard shortcut. You need to press Command-Space followed by Command-4.
Speaking of third-party developers, one claim that often gets leveled at Apple is its tendency to “Sherlock” apps: that is, provide functionality in its OS that’s already offered by third-party apps, thus arguably making it harder for those apps to survive.
However, that phenomenon has always been more nuanced, thanks to the fact that Apple more often than not implements only the lowest common denominator version of these pieces of functionality.
For example, take the new Clipboard History feature of macOS. It does only what its name suggests: keeps a history of things on your clipboard. That’s useful enough in and of itself, but what it doesn’t do is any of the features offered by the slew of third-party clipboard managers. Myself, I’m a longtime user of Tapbots’s Pastebot, which not only provides a clipboard history but also lets me store snippets for frequent use or apply filters to text on the clipboard, such as converting it to plain text or turning Markdown into HTML. Those are features Apple’s not about to build into its own Clipboard History feature because they don’t really deal with the stated purpose: keeping track of items that were on your clipboard.
Marcus Mendes (via Simon B. Støvring):
Apple’s new clipboard history only goes back eight hours.
I plan to keep using LaunchBar for this, but it’s nice to have something built in.
Previously:
Update (2025-06-20): Christian Bender:
LaunchBar, my launcher of choice, has not been replaced by the initial launch of Spotlight, nor by Quicksilver or Alfred or anything that followed. I know firsthand that it won’t go anywhere. This is because it is a labor of love. It does not need to justify a ton of VC funding. It does not need my private data. It has a very solid core, is extensible, and has never lost its focus. So I am not worried about LaunchBar one bit.
What caught my attention most is the App Intent integration. Spotlight now is another app besides Shortcuts that is able to do stuff with them.
Is there a chance that Apple opens that private API at some point?
This is what I really want. I don’t want to be limited to the Shortcuts interface to use App Intents. I want direct access to them. I want to integrate them into LaunchBar actions.
