The New CopyPaste
Multiple Copy & Paste Clipboard Manager for Mac
Short Summary
CopyPaste is the original clipboard manager (1993) for Mac that remembers all copies and cuts, allowing users to easily find, access, and paste clips from the History and Clip Sets. It has many features listed below. TriggerClip is one of those features, it lets users type a few characters to instantly paste any text, image, spreadsheet, or file from a clip, saving time and effort. CopyPaste has been popular for decades and continues with every new updates to this day.
Larger Summary
2. It’s invisible
3. It does not save previous copies which are gone forever
4. When you restart your Mac the clipboard is empty
5. You can’t edit the clipboard
Never lose a clipboard again. Enhance productivity. Incredibly useful. A time saver & life saver for all Mac users since the last century (1996) and updated with the latest Apple technologies and rewritten in Swift for 2022.
- Clip History – never forget a copy again.
- Remembers all past clips thru restarts.
- The content of each clip is visible in the CopyPaste menu.
- Preview more content, even whole pages, photos and websites, by holding down a hotkey.
- Each clip in the menu can be pasted various ways.
- Tap a clip in the menu to paste
- Paste by typing by hotkey and clip number
- Paste sequences of clips with a hotkey clip # – clip #
- Paste from Clip History and any Clip Set
- Paste from transformed clips via certain ‘Actions’
- Clip Sets are sets of useful more permanent clips.
- Transform clips with growing number of Actions like, Extract, Convert, Translate, Clean, Insert, Sort, Stats, Quotes and URL…
- Actions can be used on the main clipboard, Clip 0.
- Also on any clip in the Clip History or any Clip Set.
- Delete any clip anytime you decide.
- Backup all clips and clip sets.
- Share clips instantly via iCloud and other ways.
- Clip Managers allow displaying, editing clips and allows drag&drop of clips between Clip Sets.
- OCR text anywhere on screen into a clip.
- Maintains confidentiality of password mangers.
- Get emojis into clips easily.
- Paste any clip of formatted text, as plain text, using hotkey into any app.
- Easy to use right from it’s menu, extends what you already know from past experience.
- Good Help/Manual for deeper understanding
- Open clip content in any app.
- Share clip content to any app.
- Append unlimited selections to the main clip 0.
- Numbers all clips in Clipboard History and every Clip Set.
- Paste via hotkey and the number of the clip.
- Move clips between clipsets.
- Open URL’s in a clip with a hotkey.
- Control the pasteboard types kept in Clip History.
- Paste direct from any Clip Set by menu or hotkey
- Paste any number of different clips sequence at once
- Much more to come…
CopyPaste Manual Link
Check out the CopyPaste Manual by tapping for more details.
Overview
Once upon a time apps were not multi-tasking. You would use one app at a time. Sharing in these ‘before times’ was difficult. To overcome this early limitation Mac OS was the first to use a system clipboard. The system clipboard allowed copying text or graphic into a ‘system clipboard’ in one app, quitting that app, launching another app and pasting from that same ‘system clipboard’. At that time it was a revolutionary invention and productivity enhancer.
About that time we came out with the original CopyPaste which allowed the Mac to use and remember multiple clipboards from within any app. It remembered 10 clips and was the first multi-clipboard utility for any computer. It became very popular. Overtime new features were added, additional clips, more features like actions on clips, additional clipsets were added to the clip history. Decades passed, now in 2021 another complete rewrite of CopyPaste has taken place. The ancient Mac OS clipboard is the same but anyone can upgrade it by adding CopyPaste.
History Of The Clipboard
Copy and Paste History at Xerox Park
From Wikipedia “Inspired by early line and character editors that broke a move or copy operation into two steps—between which the user could invoke a preparatory action such as navigation—Lawrence G. “Larry” Tesler proposed the names “cut” and “copy” for the first step and “paste” for the second step. Beginning in 1974, he and colleagues at Xerox Corporation Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) implemented several text editors that used cut/copy-and-paste commands to move/copy text.[4]”
Apple Clipboard History
On 24th January 1984, Apple introduced the Mac. One of the Mac’s unique abilities was the clipboard, which allowed you to copy info from one application and then paste that info into another application. Prior to the Mac and Lisa (another Apple computer model), operating systems had no inter-application communication. The clipboard was revolutionary in 1984. This was the first popularization of copy, cut & paste and the use of a a clipboard with not just text but many media types.
We asked Bruce Horn (creator of the Mac Finder; see below) for some points about the history of the clipboard in computer science.
“The idea of cut/paste existed in Smalltalk (as did all of the modeless editing concepts), but the visible clipboard was created by Apple. I don’t exactly know who thought of showing the contents of the last thing cut; that came out of the Lisa group, so maybe Larry Tesler would know. Tesler was also the originator of modeless text editing at PARC with his Gypsy editor, which then came to the Smalltalk system. The idea of multiple different but simultaneous types on the clipboard was my idea (e.g., text + pict, for example) and used the four-byte resource type, and was first done on the Mac. I think either Andy H. or Steve Capps actually wrote the code for the clipboard (i.e., the scrap manager) on the Mac”. ~ Bruce Horn 2001.
Bruce Horn is definitely one of the people to ask about the history of the clipboard because he was part of the original team that created the Macintosh. He was responsible for the design and implementation of the Finder, Resource Manager, Dialog Manager, the type/creator mechanism for files and applications, and the multi-type clipboard design, among other architectural innovations built into the Macintosh OS. He worked long hours on computers that had very small amounts of RAM memory to create many of the things that we now all take for granted.
Bruce was recruited at the age of 14 by Ted Kaehler to do some programming experiments in Smalltalk, at Alan Kay’s Learning Research Group in the mid-seventies at the Learning Research Group at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). By the time he joined the Mac team in late 1981, he was an expert in object-oriented programming and graphical user interfaces. Bruce went on to work at Eloquent, Inc.; was one of the first employees at Adobe Systems, Inc.; Maya Design Group; and still later the Institute for Industrial Research in Oslo, Norway.
We also asked Steve Capps (another of the original team that created the Mac), and this is what he had to say: “We all three, Bruce, Andy and Steve (Bruce Horn, Andy Hertzfeld and Steve Capps) probably dabbled here and there, but Andy wrote the majority of the code in the initial release (all few hundred bytes of it). He also wrote the scrapbook desk accessory which let you simulate an n-deep clipboard. Bruce should indeed get the credit for the multiple representations of the same data idea — that wasn’t in Lisa as far as I know”. ~ Steve Capps 2006.
If anyone has any additional points or clarifications about the history of the clipboard, please write and tell us. We are always interested.
CopyPaste App History
Once upon a time apps were not multi-tasking. You would use one app at a time. Sharing in these ‘before times’ was difficult. To overcome this early limitation Mac OS was the first to use a system clipboard. The system clipboard allowed copying text or graphic into a ‘system clipboard’ in one app, quitting that app, launching another app and pasting from that same ‘system clipboard’. At that time it was a revolutionary invention and productivity enhancer.
About that time we came out with the original CopyPaste which allowed the Mac to use and remember multiple clipboards from within any app. It remembered 10 clips and was the first multi-clipboard utility for any computer. It became very popular. Overtime new features were added, additional clips, more features like actions on clips, additional clipsets were added to the clip history. Decades passed, now in 2021 another complete rewrite of CopyPaste has taken place. The ancient Mac OS clipboard is the same but anyone can upgrade it by adding CopyPaste.
CopyPaste, the first multiple clipboard utility, was created by Peter Hoerster in 1993. CopyPaste for Mac was the first version. The reason he embarked on the programming was simply to generate the current Bahá’í date on his computer (Peter is a Bahá’í). Having enjoyed learning to do this, he continued programming, and the result was the incredibly popular CopyPaste for Mac OS 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 and 14.
The Latest Version
Macs come with only 1 clipboard and every time you make a copy all previous clip info are lost forever. CopyPaste changes that because it works in the background and remembers all copies and cuts creating a ‘Clip History’. That is the basic info but there is much more…
Absolutely essential. I can’t count the number of times a day I use Copypaste. – James Fitz, Longtime CopyPaste User
CopyPaste is the latest incarnation of the one and only, award winning, easy to use, multiple clipboard editing, display and archive utility. Use the new Clip Browser (horizontal browser) or Clip Palette (vertical browser) to see clips from different points of view. Use the ‘CopyPaste Tools’ to act on clipboard data in an instant. Save all clipboards through restarts. Don’t be limited to one clipboard and never lose a clip again. CopyPaste is a time saver/life saver for all Mac users from beginner thru advanced. Try CopyPaste to expand the potential of your Mac, start doing less and accomplishing more.
CopyPaste is the original multiple clip utility for the Mac. CopyPaste has been massively popular since its first release. What has made it so widely appreciated? Usefulness. CopyPaste magnifies and multiplies the usefulness of the humble clipboard and it does it invisibly in the background.
One of the revolutionary features that came with the Mac in 1984 was the unique ability to select text or pictures, etc, then copy that data into a clipboard, to hold that content temporarily and then paste it in the same application or a different one. The clipboard was used to transfer all kinds of info between programs on the Mac, and later this feature was imitated in many other operating systems.
A few years later CopyPaste was the first to take that single clipboard and expand it to add multiple clipboards. This meant that more data could be moved in less time. CopyPaste also allowed these multiple clipboards to be displayed, edited, archived and saved through restarts. CopyPaste revealed the untapped potential of the Mac clipboard.
CopyPaste Features
Compare Old & New Specs
Tap here or above link to compare the specs of ‘CopyPaste Pro’ to the new ‘CopyPaste’
User Raves
Ain’t a Mac without it! – Michael Jay Warren
Absolutely essential. I can’t count the number of times a day I use CopyPaste. – James Fitz
Thanks again for a great and indispensable piece of software! I think it is FANTASTIC! – Dan Sanfilippo
Can’t live without it!!! Great product! It’s indispensable and thank you for developing it! – Roger Euchler
“I use CopyPaste all the time! It’s the single most-important add-on software on my Mac! – Alán Apurim
CopyPaste: once you try it, you wonder how could you live without it! – Prof. Dr. Gabriel Dorado, Molecular Biology & Bioinformatics