By Jason Snell

December 14, 2023 12:40 PM PT

The case for clipboard managers

Last week, I walked myself through the process of realizing the power of macOS Defaults and how, 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.

Response to that discovery has been… interesting. All the true nerds wrote in to agree vociferously about how they simply couldn’t live without one. Everyone else… has apparently spent the entire time they’ve been using a computer not using one and can’t really understand why they should care!

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. (If you prefer YouTube, you should probably just watch this excellent video from Stephen Robles from earlier this year.)

Breaking tradition

The clipboard’s weird, right? The Mac is credited with popularizing graphical user interfaces, but the clipboard is this invisible place where data lives, unseen but waiting to re-emerge at a later time. Rachel Greenham called it a liminal space stuff floats in the other day, and she’s not wrong. It’s like a little pocket universe.

But the clipboard exists at the heart of one of the greatest features of the Mac: the Cut, Copy, and Paste commands on the Mac’s Edit menu. It’s such a fundamental part of the computing experience that it’s kind of hard to conceive of what you’d do if you needed to get text from that web browser to that email window or from that word processor to that to-do app. (Drag and drop, maybe? So fiddly.)

Using copy/cut and paste feels like second nature, even to people who don’t consider themselves particularly sophisticated computer users. You pull it from here and put it over there. Even though it’s kind of esoteric—you have to use a keyboard shortcut or a menu item—I feel like regular users get it, internalize it, and use it pretty quickly. (Full credit to the Lisa group at Apple, who invented it in 1980.)

For all this time, the macOS Clipboard has been capable of holding one thing. It could be an enormous image file or a couple of characters of plain text—but if you copy something new, the old one goes away. One in, one out. (On classic macOS, the included Scrapbook desk accessory was a clever workaround since you could load it up with as much junk as you liked and then take it out later.)

Apple’s keeping the clipboard relatively untouched¹ for decades suggests its perfection as a concept and Apple’s implicit satisfaction with it. And yet… surely there’s more that could be done with it? For years, third-party apps have extended the clipboard in numerous ways, while Apple has done almost nothing.

Why a clipboard manager?

If I’m going to suggest that Apple add clipboard management to macOS, I need to make a case that it’s going to be valued by regular people and not get in the way of normal use. Cluttering up the Mac interface with gewgaws is bad for the user experience.

What works to my advantage here is the clipboard’s invisibility. Even when you’re using a clipboard manager, that liminal space is still invisible, and so far as you and your Mac and all your apps know, it contains one single item. Copy in, paste out. Nothing changes!

But here’s the beauty of it: With a clipboard manager, that liminal space no longer holds a single item. Behind the single item, there’s a big stack of previous items—a bit like how a browser tab only holds a single page, but the browser history remembers every previous page you’ve visited. Imagine if you took the back button and history away from a web browser. (It would be bad.)

The magic moment of using a clipboard manager comes when you realize you need to access something that’s not the One True Item on the clipboard. If you’re using the standard Mac clipboard and you copy something priceless and then, a minute later, copy something useless—welp, too bad, the priceless thing is gone, and it’s never coming back. A good clipboard manager lets you use a keyboard shortcut or a menu item to view your previous clipboards, choose the item you want to fish out and bring it back.

And that’s my pitch for why macOS should have its own clipboard manager: Because it adds undo to the clipboard via a discoverable mechanism like a keyboard shortcut and an item in the Edit menu right next to Cut, Copy, and Paste. For me, it’s become part of my Mac muscle memory: command-backslash brings up a long list of clipboard history, from which I can retrieve what I want.

It gets better. 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.

Using a clipboard manager also reduces a lot of annoying clicking back and forth between different apps. If you need to copy five items from a document and paste them into five different web form boxes, you don’t need to tab back and forth and copy them one at a time. Just copy all five, then move to the web form and paste them from history. It’s so much less annoying!

Beyond the basics

That’s my regular user case. Of course, there are power-user features that Apple could choose to implement—but in my opinion, they shouldn’t bother. Apple features are generally crowd-pleasers that leave a lot of the nitpicky details to be addressed by third-party apps. It should leave something for the third-party apps that I’m suggesting get Sherlocked.

Those power-user features can include things like semi-permanent “shelves” for commonly copied and pasted items or powerful filters that can convert clipboard content on the fly to different formats. (It’s pretty great to copy styled text and paste Markdown, for example.) Third-party clipboard managers let you add keystrokes for all sorts of items, including pasting two or three or more layers deep in the history. I’ve been using a clipboard manager for two decades, and even I don’t use most of these features, but they will absolutely fit perfectly into some workflows.

If you don’t have a clipboard manager, where can you get one? First off, you might already be using one! I use LaunchBar, which has one, and Keyboard Maestro, which also has one. If you use the launcher apps Alfred or Raycast, you’ve already got a clipboard manager installed.

When my friend Todd Vaziri surveyed social media asking for suggestions for a clipboard manager, two apps were the most common standalone suggestions²: the $13 Pastebot, which Dan Moren uses, and the $30/year Paste, which is also available as part of the SetApp bundle.

I’d need to use both of those apps for a long time in order to write a deeply nuanced comparison. They’re different, each with its advantages, and you should be able to try both for free via one means or another so you know what you’re getting yourself into. Paste has a very visual “shelf” interface that some people will love (and which struck me as overkill), while PasteBot strikes me as being pretty much the platonic ideal of a third-party clipboard app. (Still, I’m sticking with LaunchBar. Muscle memory is powerful.)

Will it happen?

Sometimes, Apple surprises us and releases new macOS features that are legitimately macOS features, not just spin-off features from iOS and iPadOS. But most of the work Apple does these days is building cross-device features. So, while I’d love to discover a future version of macOS with a basic clipboard history built in, I’d like to make a pitch that’s more extensive but might be a better sell inside Apple.

What if… clipboard history for all Apple devices? That’s right, iPad and iPhone too. The interface would be a bit more awkward there, but it’s already awkward and involves meaningful taps and floating menus… so would it be any worse? And then, to wrap it all together, your devices all use iCloud to sync your clipboard histories together so they’re accessible everywhere.

Of course, there are security and privacy issues here—but a lot of those issues were already addressed by Continuity Clipboard. I think they can be overcome if Apple’s sufficiently motivated, and the idea of being able to fish out a link I copied on my Mac a few hours ago on my iPad…. seems pretty great?

Anyway, enough dreaming. If you’re a Mac user, you can benefit from this feature now via a third-party utility, and it might even be one you’re already running! I can’t recommend using a clipboard manager highly enough. Even if all it ever does is spare you from accidentally copying over something important, it’ll be worth it.

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