These Are the Best Clipboard Managers for Your Mac
Every time you copy something to your Mac, it is saved in an invisible place called the clipboard. You can usually confirm its existence on the clipboard by pasting it somewhere. But for a more technical approach, you can open Finder on your Mac, select the Edit menu, and click Show Clipboard to see what’s there.
Unfortunately, your Mac limits the number of items on the clipboard to exactly one. This means that the next time you accidentally press Command + C instead of Command + V , you will lose access to the previously copied item, and if you want to get it back, you will have to copy it again. If you want to store more than one item at a time on your Mac’s clipboard , consider using a clipboard manager.
Use the clipboard manager built into the launcher app.
If you’ve replaced Spotlight search with something better, you may already have access to the built-in clipboard manager. Popular launcher apps like Alfred , LaunchBar , and Raycast have the ability to store clipboard history. They have everything you need – history, support for multiple file types, and easy ways to paste anything from your clipboard. However, with these options, you miss out on the advanced features of the clipboard manager such as pasting multiple items together, editing clipboard items, etc.
clips
If you want a simple and free clipboard manager, try Clipy. It stores your clipboard history and allows you to use simple keyboard shortcuts to paste the last 10 entries ( Command + [number] , where the number is from 0 to 9). It’s a bit buggy with images, so it’s best to use it if your use case mostly involves copying and pasting text.
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Download Clipy (free)
Pastebot
Pastebot is incredibly popular among Mac users. Its developers are well known for the now defunct Twitter client Tweetbot and the Mastodon Ivory client. Pastebot is a menu bar app that lets you store your clipboard history, quickly make changes to text (like converting it to lowercase or uppercase), and has filters that let you create HTML wrappers around plain text. The latter is useful for quickly creating lists and setting up URLs.
Pastebot’s best feature is sequential paste, which allows you to copy multiple items one after the other and paste them in the same order. This is great if you want to fill out your name, address, zip code and other fields on the website.
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Download Pastebot ($12.99, 14-day free trial available)
Copy them
For those who need an advanced clipboard manager, Copy ‘Em is the best choice. It covers all the basic features you need from a clipboard manager, such as unlimited clipboard history, saving all types of files to the clipboard, and simple keyboard shortcuts to quickly paste recently copied items. Copy ‘Em allows you to paste copied images in the format of your choice, can be configured to paste items in a virtual machine environment, can automatically remove formatting from text, the list goes on. It’s a bit of a shame that this app doesn’t offer a free trial, which would be useful for advanced users to see if the app suits their workflow.
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Download Copy ‘Em for Mac ($14.99)
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Download Copy ‘Em for iPhone (free download, $8.99/year for pro features).
Paste now
For those who need a multi-platform clipboard manager, PasteNow is a good option. For one in-app purchase price, you can use all of the app’s features on your Mac, iPhone, and iPad. Apart from storing different types of files from the clipboard, it also allows you to create smart lists to automatically collect data from different applications based on the parameters you specify. This is good if you want to avoid the hassle of manually copying a lot of data.
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Download PasteNow (Free Unlock Pro Features for Mac, iPhone and iPad for $7.99)