We’ve all been there: you copy a link or an image that you wanted to share with someone, but then you forget about it and accidentally copy something else over it. Sounds familiar? Yeah, that’s why you need an app to remember what has been in your clipboard.
There are plenty of apps that do just that: keep a history of the contents of your clipboard. Seriously, just search the App Store for “Clipboard” and see for yourself. That’s why today we decided to bring you an update to our previous clipboard roundup, with some of our newer favorite options for improving your clipboard. Want to check them out?
Your Clipboard History and Not Much Else
CopyLess
Copyless stands out from similar apps for its organized interface. It’s very easy to see what you’ve stored in your clipboard and where it came from in the stand-alone main window of the app, as it is very visual and it’ll display various types of information depending on the content, such as previews for pictures.
Searching, plain text exporting, snippet support, quick look, and customizable keyboard shortcuts make the app even more attractive. CopyLess offers two tiers of pricing: a light free version (which limits the number of stored items to 10) and a paid version that removes these limitations.
Price: Free / $6.99
Requires: OS X 10.6.6 or later
Developer: Maxbor
ClipMenu
ClipMenu remains one of the best options after being on the market for more than a few years now. It was featured on our previous roundup and since then it has kept up with the competition, especially because it is one of the few free options out there.
It runs in your menu bar and holds all your recent items in an easy to explore list. It’s heavily customizable, and it also has the option to store snippets, which puts it up there with the paid full-featured alternatives.
Price: Free
Requires: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) or later.
Developer: Naotaka Morimoto
Collective
Collective follows the same steps as CopyLess with its organization and search features for collecting your clipboard history. They’re both very similar apps, with a few differences in the interface and the odd missing feature.
Collective’s a bit prettier and looks more native than CopyLess, and it’s a few bucks cheaper. It lacks some of CopyLess’ premium features though, such as snippet support. Truth be told, you can’t go wrong with either of them.
Price: $1.99
Requires: OS X 10.6.6 or later
Developer: Generation Loss Interactive
A Different Type of Clipboard App
TextScrub
TextScrub is not a clipboard history manager, but an app that manipulates the current content of your clipboard to make it tidier: it removes weird formatting, unnecessary line breaks, bullet points and extra spaces to make your text cleaner and easier to paste elsewhere.
It also has smart text substitutions, just give it a phrase or snippet of text that it should convert into something else, and it’ll automatically do it when it cleans up your text. If you use it wisely, it could save you tons of time.
Price: $2.99
Requires: OS X 10.7 or later, 64-bit processor
Developer: Drone Creative
The Do-It-Alls
Speedy
Speedy is an app that tries to do a lot of things: it gives you a hovering toolbar that includes shortcuts for accessing your most recent files, websites, favorite documents, workflows, text snippets, and of course, recently copied items.
The downside of it trying to do a bit of everything is that it does everything in a shallow manner, therefore the clipboard functionality is pretty basic: it’ll only give you access to 5-15 recent items per category and there’s not much else to it. It’s a nice all-round app, so if you are interested in any of its other features, it’ll work for you as a complete package.
Price: $14.99
Requires: OS X 10.6.6 or later
Developer: Apimac
Alfred Powerpack
Alfred is a very well known launcher app and all-round very complete app. With it you can find files, launch apps, set shortcut commands, launch searches and websites, and much more. It’s free, but there’s a Powerpack that brings a ton more functionality to the app.
One of those premium features is clipboard history support. Just type “clip” in your Alfred bar to bring up all your recent clipboard items, where you can choose the one you’d like to set as active in your clipboard again and it’ll also automatically get pasted to any active text boxes. In addition, it has a snippet feature that goes along with the clipboard one, and behaves pretty similarly.
Price: £15 – ~$23
Requires: Mac OS X 10.6 or later
Developer: Running With Crayons
Unclutter
Unclutter does exactly what it says: it provides a drawer for you to keep notes and files and avoid being disorganized. It also provides a quick way of checking out and modifying what’s currently in your clipboard, be it an image, file path or just text.
Price: $4.99
Requires: OS X 10.7 or later, 64-bit processor
Developer: Software Ambience Corp.
Conclusion
There’s certainly no shortage of apps that keep a history of your clipboard’s contents. You can easily find a prefectly functional free alternative like ClipMenu, or if you’d like to enjoy a few more premium features, there are some reasonably priced alternatives such as CopyLess, Collective or even the Alfred Powerpack.
With today’s roundup we wanted to expand on our previous clipboard roundup and show you some of our favorite newer alternatives for improving the clipboard. But what do you use? Do you have any recommendations you’d like to throw out? Let us know in the comment section below!
     |