macOS

Manage Your Clipboard History With Paste

Written by Kevin

Paste is a new way to cut, copy and paste for Mac. It keeps everything you’ve ever copied and lets you use your clipboard history whenever you need it.

Clipboard history managers are a dime a dozen these days. Even searching the word “clipboard” within the Mac App Store will give you an assortment of apps to choose from. It’s almost as overwhelming as searching for a weather app in iOS.

When I bought a new laptop this year I decided to spend sometime researching productivity apps that could make my life a bit easier. My profession requires me to spend countless hours writing code for various projects and a lot of this code is similar. Whether it’s stylesheet elements or methods I am reusing, everything is just one copy away from being erased from my clipboard. How many times have you copied something that you were about use, became distracted, and then overwrote it with something else? This happens to me everyday!

Why should we have to spend time looking up the previously copied item again when we could just find it with the click of a keyboard shortcut? It’s time for me to introduce Paste, a wonderfully simple clipboard history manager.

Paste runs in the background of your machine recording your clipboard history. It gives you the ability to record an unlimited amount of clipboard items. It is customizable as well, so say you only want to save the last 100 items you copied, you can set up Paste to do just that. At any point you can press Shift + Command + V on your keyboard to view your Paste history. As you can see in the screenshot above Paste records the text, image, or file you have copied as well as the program it was copied from.

Searching in Paste

Searching in Paste

This is extremely handy because say you copied a friend’s address from your email earlier in the day but don’t want to have to scroll through all of your other programs Paste history to find that address again. You can simply type in the name of the program to filter your clipboard history by that desired program. With that being said if I type in “Mail” I’m only going to get copies that occurred within the Mail app, allowing me to find that address I was looking in no time.

Not only does Paste record the program it came from but it also saves the date and time of when the copy occurred. When viewing the Paste history you are able to view the amount of characters in the string of text you copied, if it is an image it will tell you the dimensions of that image, and if it’s a file it will tell you the size of that file and it’s location.

Paste goes one step further and allows you to setup rules for excluding certain programs from being monitored. For example, I set Paste to not record my copies when using 1Password, my password manager of choice. I don’t particularly want any of my passwords or private information to be saved within Paste.

Paste was definitely the best, feature packed, clipboard history manager I’ve come across. The developers of Paste are also currently developing a version for iOS.

About the author

Kevin

Kevin is the Founder and Senior Editor of Tech Heavy. When he isn't writing about the latest tech tools he spends his days working in an IT department in Dubuque, IA. @kevincray