How do I view my clipboard history on OS X?

I am often copying and pasting various tidbits of information, and then forgetting to save it. I would copy something else and lose what I had in the clipboard before.

Is there some sort of built-in way to view the history of the clipboard, or do I have to install a program?

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13 Answers

There's a multitude of applications that do this, but no built-in one.

FlyCut, an open source fork of Jumpcut

1. Jumpcut
   • Open source and free.
   • Even simpler.
   • Install via: brew install --cask jumpcut.
2. Flycut (Mac App Store link)
   • A fork of Jumpcut with a few added features
   • Free in the Mac App Store
   • Install via: brew install --cask flycut.
3. Copy 'em Paste
   • A paid, but simpler and cheaper alternative. Tries to exactly one thing well.
4. Alfred Powerpack
   • Another paid alternative, with great clipboard history management as part of its pack. See Dan Udeys answer.
5. Clyppan
   • Used to be open source, then closed source and available in the Mac App Store (for approx. £2), but is now no longer available for download.
   • Simple.

6

I realise that the question has been answered, but here is another recommendation for a clipboard history manager:

ClipMenu

Menubar item:

Hovering menu (hotkey):

Apart from the menubar and floating window, it also has customisable 'actions' that allow you to manipulate text as you paste it (e.g., uppercase everything), and support for snippets to hold commonly pasted text.

In my experiences it is easily the best of the simple clipboard managers.

9

The best I've found is Alfred, which has a phenomenal clipboard history functionality as part of its ($15) Powerpack. Among its features:

1. Clearing history by time (e.g. 'keep only 7 days')
2. Ignore apps (so text copied from Keychain, 1password, etc. isn't saved to the history)
3. Snippets (for commonly pasted text)
4. Clipboard merging (merge the current clipboard item with the previous)
5. Max clipboard size (up to 'unlimited')

I bought it for other reasons, but I use the clipboard history every few minutes throughout my day, so for $15 it was a pretty big win.

I was used to ClipMenu, because I need a list of history items visible I don't want to waste time browsing thru history. However ClipMenu was not updated for years now, and dropbox links don't work anymore. I was able to find backed-up dmg file on one Japanese website, but what eventually solved my problem is a clone of ClipMenu called Clipy

So you can download and install it manually or via brew cask

brew install --cask clipy

1

The perennial answer to OS X questions: Quicksilver

See these Quicksilver clipboard tutorials:

• (recommended)

6

I've tried them all and the best experience and best ongoing support has been from LaunchBar.

Best feature: 40-item clipboard history. It makes writing code so much easier.

I wrote CmdVees to scratch my own itch.

It works like a stack. You can copy several items in sequence (like any clipboard manager) but when you hit Cmd-v, the pasted item is removed from the stack. LIFO. It may sounds weird, I guess it depends on how your brain works. For me is very natural.

It can be configured to work like a queue, FIFO, for the other brain model.

Also, it splits entries in history by time, hiding older items in a submenu:

To be honest I don't use the menu more than once in a while.

It has other goodies like joining items or swap top of the stack with selection.

It's a commercial app but feel free to ask me for a license if you fall in love with the trial and you can't afford it.

5

Alfred's Powerpack let's you view your clipboard history for up to three months! It's not free but well worth it as it is a launcher (among other things) which is actively under development.

Paste:clipboard history manager for your Mac

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PTHPasteboard

Supports at least 2,000 items in the history. (I've tried even more, though it does start to slow down at some point; a function of both the maximum number and the maximum size per entry, I expect.)

This is extremely handy when you're constantly jumping between a whole bunch of different systems, and those shorter histories (in other apps) just keep rotating around and losing stuff.

BTW: Another feature is that you can select to promote an item up to the top of the history, when pasting that item - keep important stuff from dropping off the bottom.

And it supports multiple pastebuffers, processing of text (such as pasting unformatted, or all upper / lower case), searching the history, etc. - lots of features.

1

BetterTouchTool (a paid tool with a free trial) now has an integrated clipboard manager / clipboard history viewer:

This is a nice option if you're already using BetterTouchTool for other things, since it saves you from installing (yet?) another utility program. In addition to clipboard history, I'm currently using BetterTouchTool to:

• Map buttons 4 and 5 on my mouse (the thumb buttons) to browser forward/back
• Display the currently-playing iTunes track on my Mac's touch bar.

There is also a free one that allow me to view window from which I can drag and drop items from one long list. It's copypaste pro. Alfred also should do it.

1

Once you use copyq, which works on Mac, Linux and Windows you will never use anything else ... especially after you configure a global shortcut to show it ...