How To Save Your Mac’s Cut And Copy Items

One of my all time favorite computer features is copy, cut, and paste. It’s what every Mac and Windows PC user knows how to do. It’s simple, elegant, highly useful, and the paradigm even extends to our iPhones.

What would make copy, cut, and paste even better? For Mac users, anything we copy or cut is stored on a clipboard. A single item clipboard, which flushes each time we use it. How about a multiple item clipboard?

The History Of Clips

A computer’s clipboard is so engrained into our digital psyche that there’s a Wikipedia entry for software clipboards. Part of the definition is the phrase short-term.

What you typically copy or cut onto the Mac’s clipboard doesn’t stay there very long.

As soon as you copy or cut something else, the previous item is discarded. That’s very short-term. What would be a nice addition to your Mac would be a clipboard with a real history.

Not historical, but an item-by-item history of anything and everything you’ve copied or cut.

That would be a clipboard manager.

Clips Are Not Cute

One of the easiest to use clipboard manager tools is CuteClips. Simply put, it’s a hidden utility which automatically records and saves everything you copy or cut. CuteClips icon might be a cuddly kitten, but the app is all utility.

A clipboard manager is all about storing and retrieving what you’ve cut or copied. That’s what CuteClips does. Getting started is easy. CuteClips is a Menubar app that opens with a click or a hotkey.

You can click the Menubar icon to bring up CuteClips or set up a special hotkey.

All the most recent clips are stored as a stacked list of text. However, if you mouse over one of the stored clipboard items, the image or text will appear in the window. One more click will paste the selected item.

Think of CuteClips as a clipboard manager that remembers the most recent clips, and gives them to you with a click. No more copying or cutting, then repeating, only to lose something you wanted to keep.

Preferences are modest and self explanatory.

The General tab gives you access to the hotkey combination, the option to launch CuteClips on Login, and other features. Advanced? It’s not so advanced—just an option to uninstall CuteClips.

CuteClips can assign a permanent sticky on some clips so they don’t get overwritten. Other clips can be assigned a keyboard shortcut so they can be used again without invoking CuteClips from the Menubar.

To add more clips to CuteClips simply grab the lower right corner grab bar and pull down. More clipboard item slots appear.

CuteClips isn’t cluttered with too many unnecessary features. If you’re new to multiple clipboards, this one is worth a look.

CuteClips is inexpensive compared to others available for the Mac. I prefer the slide out tray in PTH Pasteboard but CuteClips is easier to use, and comes with a lower price tag.