ClipTools: Using the Clipboard Manager Functions

Learn how to use the clipboard manager features of ClipTools. You can access a history of text you have copied to your clipboard. Plus you can paste as plain text, group paste, assign keyboard shortcuts, and more.

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Video Transcript: Hi! This is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at using the Clipboard Management Features of ClipTools. 
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ClipTools is the free Mac App that I developed that contains a lot of different useful utilities. But one of the primary things that it does is to work as a Clipboard Manager. You can find ClipTools by searching for it in The App Store on your Mac. Once you've installed it and launched it, it should appear here in the Menu Bar. The basic idea of a Mac Clipboard is that when you select some text, like this, and then go Edit, Copy or Command C it will put that text in the Clipboard. You can then use Command V, or Paste to paste that in another place in that document or another document. But there is only one Clipboard. Every time you copy it replaces the Clipboard content with whatever it is you copied.
The idea of the Clipboard Manager is it keeps a history of the Clipboard. So, when you copy something it just shifts the current clipboard down one slot and puts the new thing that you copied into the current clipboard. For instance, here if I were to select and use Command C to copy the word quick that's now in the Clipboard. But if I were then to select and then copy the word brown that's now in the Clipboard. But, using ClipTools here I can access the current clipboard and the previous one. I can keep copying and it will keep saving the different Clipboards in a History. Now when you use Command V to paste, it will paste what is in the current clipboard. But with a Clipboard Manager, like ClipTools, you could use the Menu here to get to a previous item, like this one, and paste that instead. 
Now if you were to copy more things into the Clipboard it will keep saving the History. Notice at this point I've saved four things. These four words here. If I were to look here in ClipTools you could see the three most recent ones appear here in the Menu for easy access. But More Clips appears when you have more than these three and older items appear here. So the 4th item appears there. If I were to Copy another you could see it moves everything down. So now I've got two under More and three are always visible at the top level. Now you could go to Settings and here you modify how many clips are saved in total. So in this case ten clips would be saved. Once you have ten clips and you copy another one, one will drop off the end of the list to make room. You could also set how many clips are shown at the top level of the Menu itself. So if I were to change this to, say, 15 clips and 4 were shown in the main menu then I could see 4 here and more clips would then allow for another 11 items.
Now you can use modifier keys to access special functions when pasting from ClipTools. So, for instance, here I've switched to Rich Text and changed the text here to Bold and a blue color. Now if I were to type something else, like this, and then change this to black and maybe make it regular text, maybe even smaller, then I would completely expect that if I were to type more that it would follow along with the style that I was using. That's just natural. BUT, if I were to select this text here and Copy and then go here and Paste notice how it pastes the text including the styles. Well, ClipTools allows you instead paste plain text, strip the styles, and then follow along just as if you were typing. If I go here I could see what I just copied. If I hold down the Shift and Control keys together you could see this changes to Paste Plain. Now when I go Paste it does it without the styles and it follows along with the current style just as if I had typed those characters. Sometimes this is called Paste and Keep Styles. Sometimes this is called Paste Plain Text. A lot of different apps offer this but you can do it in ClipTools with and of these items by holding Control and Shift at the same time. 
Now if you don't want to actually Paste the text that you select, but instead want to put that in the Clipboard for use, maybe, soon after then you can hold down the Control key and you could see you get Copy here. So I can Copy jumps into the Clipboard and now when I Paste that is what is pasted. You also may want to remove an item from here. You can do that by holding down the Shift and the Option key and that brings up Remove. So I can remove jumps and now you can see it is gone from the list. You can also hold down Control and Option and you get Paste and Remove. So this will Paste the word fox, for instance in that case, but you can see it also removed it from the list. 
There's also a function called Group Paste. So let's say I wanted to Copy fox and then I would go and Copy brown and then I would go and Copy Quick. Now the top three items here would be quick, brown, and fox. If I hold the Shift key down you could see the little up arrow there. If I select fox it will not just paste fox, but also all of the items above it. So I can select it like that and you could see I get these three here. If I go into Settings you can set the Group Paste separator. In this case backslash N works as a new line. But you could change that to, say, a comma and it will put a comma between each one or a space for that. 
Now as I mentioned before you get a certain number of clips here in the Menu. We changed that to 4 and you get more clips as well. But as you keep copying more text things will drop off the end of this list. However, you can Save things for later use. If I hold down Option and then select an item like dog. Now the next time I go to the Menu I could see Saved Clips here and I can see that one is there. Let's also save quick. Now I can see two saved clips there. You can use these just like anything that is in the main Menu or in More Clips, except that these will never disappear unless I remove them. You can use them using Shift and Option just like you can for the regular clips. If you want to organize these you can use the Shift key and you get Moved To Top. So I can move dog to the top here and now you can see in Saved Clips dog is the first one.
Now you may notice that if I move the Pointer over these different items after a second the Tool Tip appears and it tells you which app was in use when you copied this. In addition to that if you were to select a lot of text, like let's select this entire sentence here, then you could see it doesn't have room to fit all the text there. So the Tool Tip not only shows you the app but shows you the complete text. So you could have paragraphs of text that are copied and you could only see the first 30 or so characters but the Tool Tip will tell you what the full clip is or at least a large chunk of the beginning of that clip.
Now in Settings there's also the option to Clear Clips. You can clear all the regular clips and you can also clear clips from the Saved list. There's also the ability to Ignore Clips from specific apps. So you can add the names of these apps separated by commas. Make sure you get the App name spelled exactly right, spaces and everything count. If an App listed here is the front-most app when you copy then that clipboard will be ignored and never added to ClipTools. So you can your password managers to it if you like. But note that if the front-most app is a browser, say Safari, and you use a browser extension, say one from a password manager, then all ClipTools knows is that the front-most app is Safari. If Safari isn't in this list then it will save that Clipboard item. It has no way to know that it's a password opposed to a piece of text you copied from a site. 
There's also the option to Hide clips from apps. So you can select names of apps here and what happens then is the clip is copied to the Clipboard and you can use it. But the name will not appear when you look in the Menu. So, for instance, I have System Settings set for this now. I could use this when I go to the Password Manager in System Settings. I'll go down here to Passwords and then, say, I'll select this item here. I'll copy the password and then when I look in ClipTools you can see it shows Hidden. But it actually still will paste if I select this.
Now there are also a lot of keyboard shortcuts that you could use to access Clips. So, for instance, you can see here that Command 1, 2, 3, 4 all the way up to 9 will work for the first nine items here. In order to access those you need to have the Menu active first. So I could click here to activate the Menu and then do Command 3 to paste the third item. Note that these things will work with the modifier keys. So, for instance, if I do Option to Save you could see that that's Option 2 now. So I just do Option 2 and it will work. Under Saved Clips you can see that item appear there. Now if you want to use just the keyboard you can. You go into Settings. There is a Setting for Global Keyboard Shortcut 1 and 2. You can set these to what you want by clicking here. So I've got the first one set to Shift Command c and that is set to activate the Menu. So now I can activate the Menu with that command. Keep in mind that say pasting the third item is Command 3. So Shift Command c brings the Menu up and then Command 3 will paste the third item. I never had to use the Pointer. 
Now you can also set another keyboard shortcut to Paste Clip 2 or 3 or Saved Clip 1 or 2. Even Paste and Remove Clip 1 is there as an option. So the idea behind this is I could Paste Clip 3 just by Shift Command m. So Shift Command m will do that for me. The reason, of course, that it is Clip 2 or Clip 3 is Clip 1 isn't really needed. Command V will do that.  
So there's an overview of all the Clipboard Manager Tools inside of ClipTools. Of course, ClipTools also does a lot more than that. It's allowing you to do things like paste the date and time. There's a whole set of functionality under Smart Clips. There are calculations and lots of things you can do with selected text. You can go to Instructions and Feedback which will take you to MacMost.com/cliptools. But you can view that before getting ClipTools from The App Store. This goes into detail about each one of these listing all the different modifier keys and things that you can do with the Clipboard Manager functions. So you don't have to keep referring back to this video now that you've gotten an overview. You can simply use this documentation to figure out how to access everything and find out what else ClipTools does as well. I hope you find ClipTools useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 9 Responses to “ClipTools: Using the Clipboard Manager Functions”

Chris Mitchell

2 years ago

Gary, the one thing I dearly love about CloudClip and Paste is the iCloud sync feature between MacOS and iPhone/iPadOS - I use this regularly. If ClipTools had this feature it would definitely be my #1 clipboard manager tool.

Jak G

I really like ClipTools, and thanks for explaining about the modifiers. I wouldn't have tried them if you hadn't demonstrated them.

Nick V

Thank you for a great contribution to the Mac community. ClipTools is far more robust than my previous copy/paste app, and switching over was a no-brainer. One feature has me stumped, however: why not incorporate the ability to remove a highlighted item in the list with a simple tap of the delete key? Cmd-A to highlight everything in the list? Cmd-click to select specific items to delete/remove?

Gary Rosenzweig

Nick: since I’m using a menu bar status menu I have to stick with what can be done using that interface. So using the delete key and things like that won’t work.

Brook Acklom

Clip Tools looks great; what a pity it doesn't work with Big Sur! Very disappointed.

Brook: Supporting past systems is actually a lot of work. First, I would not have been able to use the latest software libraries from Apple and elsewhere in that case. That would have made things more difficult Then I would have had to maintain a Big Sur machine and tested it on that with everything, a lot more effort. As a free app I needed to keep roadblocks like that to a minimum as the result could have been that the app would have never been available for anyone. Only so many hours in the day and so much effort I can put into it...

Greg K

How I use Cliptools. I save text to a smart clip, text that I regularly want to insert into a report or email. I then designate keys on my Stream Deck to insert the smart clip into my document (Hotkey switch, first press activates, 2nd press is a F key corresponding to the smart clip). Press a button, in goes the text. Has sped up my work flow considerably.

Phil Hopkins

Hi Gary,
On the next release would it be possible to add say, another three slots for Global Keyboard Shortcuts? I am finding that using Shortcut 2 for for Saved Clip 1 is extremely handy as it means I don't have to call up the menu first. I can just paste that saved clip with shift command 1.
Excellent app though, even if this can't be achieved.

Phil: Not sure. Most apps limit themselves to just one global shortcut. I thought it would be nice to have 2, so one could be for the menu, and the other for your most-used function. If I make it 3, then why not 4? Or 7? Gotta draw the line somewhere.
Note that in the latest version you do have shortcuts for the saved clips. So use global shortcut 1 to activate the menu, then Command+F(X) for each saved clip.

Comments Closed.

ClipTools: Using the Clipboard Manager Functions

Comments: 9 Responses to “ClipTools: Using the Clipboard Manager Functions”

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