How To Use the Spotlight Clipboard History In macOS Tahoe

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at the new Clipboard History functionality in macOS Tahoe. 

A new addition to macOS in macOS Tahoe, also known as macOS 26, is the ability to view your Clipboard History. So in other words when you copy something it is saved in a list so you can recall more than just the last thing that you copied. For instance, let's say we're looking at a text document like this. I'm going to select a word and Copy, and another word and Copy and another word and Copy. So now I've coped three things. In the Clipboard is the last thing that I copied. I can very easily go to another location here and Command V for Paste. But what if I wanted to get to the earlier things that I copied. Previously you could only do that if you installed a 3rd party Clipboard Manager. But now you can do it using Spotlight. To Activate Spotlight you can use this button up here or just Command Space to bring it up. This brings up Spotlight in general. You can search for all sorts of things. If you move your pointer here you'll see four buttons get revealed to the right and the last one is the Clipboard area of Spotlight. You'll see there that it shows Command 4 is the shortcut. So we'll just do Command 4 to get to the Clipboard History. 

Here we see a list of the things that we previously copied to the Clipboard. The current Clipboard is at the top, in this case the word fox, but then we see brown and quick after that. Now if we were to paste normally we would get fox. But we can use this history to recall one of the previous values in the Clipboard. We can use Command Space and then Command 4. We don't even need to lift our finger up off of the Command Key. Then we can just double click on one of these. I'll just double click on this one and you can see how it pastes that Clipboard item into there. Not the most recent one. There are also a few other ways to handle it. 

If we do Command Space, Command 4 you can click on this button to the right of each item. What this will do is replace the current Clipboard with that item. So now when I return to a document I can use Command V to Paste. You could also go here and then Control Click, two-finger click on a trackpad, right click on a mouse, on any one of these items. You can select Paste or Copy, so in other words put it there at the top.

Now, of course, you may use Copy & Paste to copy other things besides text. Some of those kinds of things will also be saved to this history. So, for instance, here in the Preview App I'm viewing an image. One of the things I can do is I can make a selection and then I can copy that selection with Edit, Copy or Command C. This copies the pixels from this image and I can paste it somewhere else. So, for instance, I can return here to Pages and I can do Command V to Paste and it would paste just those pixels from that image creating a new image in this document. This is the kind of thing people do all the time with Copy & Paste. Clipboard History will manage these too. If I take a look at the Spotlight Clipboard History I'll see here a png image and it will give it a name, because I just copied it, it's not actually a file. So it will give it a name here with the date and time. So you can see it listed there. I can do the same things here. I can double click on it to Paste and I can click here if it's not the top item to make it the top item so I can paste it with Command V. I can also Control click, two-finger click or right click on it and I can do Paste, Copy, and Delete. There's also Share to be able to share this image or Open which would open this image in Preview. 

Also notice here below each item, in addition to the time at which it was copied, you also get the type of data it is. So in this case a png image. In these other cases text. 

If you find these videos valuable consider joining the more than 2000 others that support MacMost at Patreon. You get exclusive content, course discounts, and more. You can read about it at macmost.com/patreon. 

Now this also works for image files. So if I select a file, like this one here. I'll QuickLook it to show it to you. I do Command C to copy that. Then if I look at the Clipboard History you'll see that the file is there now and it shows up as a jpeg image. Now, just like I could Copy & Paste before, I can use this Clipboard History to paste it into a document. So here I am in Pages and let's say I copy something else, so it is not the most recent thing. Now if I do Command Space, Command 4 I'll see this item here. I can just double click it and it will paste that in even though I copied the file, not pixels from inside of an app like Preview. 

This also works for Screenshots. So I'll do Shift Command and 5 and I will take an area Screenshot, like this. I'll just take a corner of the screen, like that. If my options are set to go to Clipboard and I capture or at this point use Command C, it takes the Screenshot and puts it in the Clipboard. Then if I look in the Clipboard History I'll notice that that captured image is now part of this history as well. So this means you can capture a series of Screenshots, like this. Then they will all be listed here and you can paste them, one-by-one, into a document or an email message or a website. 

Now another type of data that will appear in this history is a URL. URL's are essentially just text, but they work a little differently. So let's go and copy the URL here at the top of the Safari window. I'm also going to copy a couple of links. I'll just Control Click on them and Copy Link and Control Click on this one and Copy Link. So now when I bring up the Clipboard History I'll see all of these here. But notice some differences. This one here says it is text. This one here says it's a URL. These were the links we copied. When I Control Click on these an additional option I get is Open In Browser. It will be the same thing for this link as well. But this I just copied from the Address Bar and it doesn't have that. It is just there as text. In fact any URL you copy from Documents and other places that is just text in a document that is just going to be there as text. But it only seems to be links in Safari that actually get the special URL treatment and then have Open In Browser.

Even Copy Links in other browsers don't work. Here I am in Chrome and if I Control Click and Copy this link here from Chrome and then look at it in the Clipboard History you can see it's copied as text and doesn't have that Open option. 

But the Clipboard History does handle another thing very well. That's Files. You might know that you can copy and paste files in the Finder. You can copy them and then paste them to make a copy or copy and then use a special command to move them. So, let's go in this folder here and I'm going to Copy this file. Then for a better demonstration I'm going to Copy some text, so it is no longer the top item. I can't just simply Command V to Paste. Now, back here in the Finder if I want to paste it somewhere, like say in this folder, normally if it was the most recent thing I copied I can go to Edit and then Paste and it would paste a copy there. But I can use the Clipboard History to do it the same way. I can just double click on this file and you can see it pastes a copy. If I go up a level you can see the original is still there. I copied and pasted it to get a duplicate of it. 

But you can also use it to move a file. Let's go into this folder here and I'll bring up the Clipboard History and there's the file. What you think you should be able to do is Control and then go to Paste and Hold Option and then that changes to move. Just like it does in the Edit Menu. But in fact it stays Paste and I end up with two copies of it. So instead what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring up the Clipboard History and instead of using any of these Commands, or just double clicking, I'm going to click here to Copy it to the main spot of the Clipboard. Now I can go and use Edit, Paste with the Option Key held down, or Option Command V, to paste. 

Now let's look at some more functionality that's easy to miss. When you bring up Clipboard History you can actually Search it. This is Spotlight after all. That's the main thing it does is Search. So, for instance, if I wanted to find everything that had the word quick in it I could be here and just Search at the top for quick. You can see how it narrows it down. In fact, if I were to go back to the main Spotlight Search and I would have searched for quick you can see it's not only going to find apps and files and email messages and all sorts of things, but it will find the Clipboard items here. So you don't have to go to the Clipboard History section to find Clipboard items.

Another thing you can do that's not obvious, is you could drag from the Clipboard History. So I've got Pages open here and I've opened up my Clipboard History and here is that Screenshot, for instance. I can drag this out and drag it into the document. I can do the same thing with other images and with Links, and with text. I can just drag and drag things to the Desktop, like here is this jpeg image as a file. 

Here's another clever thing it does. It avoids duplicates. So let's say I'm going to copy the lazy dog. I copy it and I see it is in the Clipboard here. Let's copy some other stuff. There's the. There's jumps. There's over. So now if I look at the History here lazy dog is down here at the bottom. The fourth item. Let's go back and copy the lazy dog. Now let's look at the history. Notice the lazy dog is at the top, where we would expect. But it has removed it from the 4th or would have been the 5th item. It realizes it is an exact duplicate of the first item and doesn't have two of them in the list. 

Now if you want to Clear items out of the Clipboard History you can, of course, do that. I've already showed you when you Control Click on something you can delete that item. You also have this button right here and you can use that to clear the entire history, like that. You can also get to Settings here, which just takes you into System Settings, and then into Spotlight. At the very bottom of the Spotlight Settings is something that applies to the Clipboard. You can just turn it Off. So if you'd rather not have this, for some reason, you can switch it Off and you will no longer have Clipboard History. As a matter of fact if you switch it Off and you bring up Spotlight you'll notice only three buttons here. The History button is now missing. 

Now there are some other limitations you should know about. One is the 8 hour time limit. Items older than 8 hours will automatically be removed from the end of the list. Another issue is that it only copies plain text. So if I go into here and I format this and if I were to copy it and create a new Pages document and then paste it in you would expect everything to be kept. But, if I were to paste it in from the Clipboard History it doesn't remember any of that. It strips out everything and only has plain text there. 

Another limitation is Passwords. But this is one that most people probably want. If you were to copy a password from the Password App by Control Clicking on the password and saying Copy Password, then it is not saved in the Clipboard History. You can see here Clipboard History is empty. This works great in the Password's App but it may not work like that in 3rd party password apps. My guess is that the 3rd party app developers need to update something to indicate that the password shouldn't be saved when copied. 

Another limitation is that is doesn't copy objects. By objects I mean things like maybe shapes, say, in Pages. You can have a shape like this. You can copy. You can paste another copy of it in this document, in another document. You can do that in Keynote. You can have different objects, say, in Numbers you've got things like tables you can copy and paste. None of those seem to get saved in the Clipboard History at all. So it sticks to just text and images, some URLs and Files. 

But even in text there is a limitation. It can't be too much text. It seems the limit is it has to be under 16,384 characters. So, of you have about 4 pages of text then it will copy and paste just fine as before. But it just won't be saved in this Spotlight Clipboard History. Also now it doesn't seem to work with some apps. For instance, in Mail if I were to copy some text from a message and then look in my Clipboard History it is not there. It might be other apps affected by this as well. It could just be a bug and something that we'll have fixed in the future version of macOS. 

Another limitation is universal Clipboard. If you, say, copy something on your iPhone and then paste it on your Mac, a feature that has been around for years, it doesn't seem like those get saved to Clipboard History either. 

So in summary, the new Spotlight Clipboard History gives you basic clipboard history features on your Mac natively. It is just built into macOS. For most people this means they no longer need to look for a third party clipboard manager. If all you need is the basic idea that you can paste something you copied three or four items back then this has you covered. If you need more advanced functionality, like long term history, extra functions on what the clips can do and how to order them and save them and pin them and all of that, then you definitely still want a third party Clipboard Manager. It is typical of Apple to add the basics but still leave the field wide open for third party developers to create apps that offer advanced features. 

Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.