PopClip Is a Powerful Right-Click on Text on Mac
Everyone works with text on their Mac, and PopClip is a simple and effective way to speed up all your text workflows. At first glance, it’s really simple. The app, also available on mobile devices, simply adds a small pop-up menu to your screen every time you select text on your Mac. By default, it gives you access to four commonly used actions: search, cut, copy, and paste. This alone is enough for most people, but the app does so much more.
Mobile devices are a little more limited, but on the Mac you can customize the flyout menu by adding or removing features, and there’s a large catalog of extensions that makes it even better. After some setup, you can use it for relatively simple operations, such as converting text, or more complex ones, such as sending text to the translation service of your choice. PopClip’s free trial allows you to use text actions 250 times, and once you’ve used them up, you can buy the app for $12 or $25. The lower price guarantees two years of updates, after which you can continue to use it without new features, but if you pay more you’ll get access to app updates as long as PopClip is in active development.
Setting up PopClip
Setting up PopClip is a bit annoying because the application window is quite small and uses tiny font sizes. Click the icon in the menu bar to get started. The good news is that you won’t have to use the menu bar window very often, so I can overlook its tiny size and simple user interface. In the application window, start by clicking on the home icon, which will allow the application to launch when you log in. This way, you won’t have to activate PopClip every time you restart your Mac.
Then go to the tab with the gear icon and change the size and position (above or below the selected text) of the flyout menu to suit your needs. The larger size is more intrusive, but makes the menu buttons easier to press. On the same page, you can also write down a keyboard shortcut to access PopClip without using a mouse. The next tab has a puzzle piece icon and allows you to customize your actions or add additional actions not included by default, such as translation or dictionary tools. Uncheck the options you don’t use, and drag the four dots next to each action up or down to reorder them.
Finally, go to the next tab to configure the list of excluded applications. PopClip menus do not appear when selecting text in these applications.
Adding extensions to improve the application
The real magic of PopClip is its support for extensions. Just go to the Extension Catalog page, select any extensions you like, download them, and open the downloaded files. This will automatically add these extensions to PopClip. Just go back to the puzzle piece icon in Settings to see the new additions. There are a lot of extensions on this page, and it can be difficult to resist adding them to the application since most of them are quite useful. There’s even an RSS feed on the extensions page, and you can add it to your RSS reader of choice to stay informed when a new tool is available.
It’s difficult to make a definitive list of the best PopClip extensions because it depends on what you want to do with the app. Personally, I like to highlight text and send it to third-party apps (to quickly create to-do lists or calendar entries, translate text, etc.), and there are tons of great actions for this. I’m also a big fan of the Add to Clipboard action, which allows me to copy multiple pieces of text and add them to the clipboard. This way, I can quickly copy a passage and add the article’s URL to the clipboard, then paste them both into a social media post in one go. Without PopClip, this would require pasting text twice and switching between tabs.