For a good paid option, Alfred[0] includes a pretty robust clipboard history manager along with a ton of other features, all in an extremely lightweight (15.6MB disk size/~40MB memory) package. You need the paid Power Pack for to use that feature, but both single version and lifetime upgrade licenses are cheap. I went for the lifetime upgrade option which so far has worked out to $12/year and improves in value each year.
LaunchBar[0], which predates Alfred but is similar in function, also has a fantastic searchable clipboard manager which includes a feature that I've not been able to find in any other clipboard manager: a push/pop stack.
With this feature you can, for example, copy a bunch of different items from a web page on to the stack, then paste them sequentially in a web form and pop them from the stack so that they're no longer in the clipboard history. With this workflow there's no hopping back and forth between pages, you do all of the copying at once in one place and all of the pasting at once in the other. It all happens via keyboard shortcuts, no interaction with the LaunchBar UI at all.
This feature is what's been keeping me on LaunchBar for almost 15 years now. Alfred looks great, but without this push/pop feature in the clipboard manager I'd have a hard time switching.
I use Alfred, but having tried at least a dozen clipboard managers, Paste[1] is still my favorite (mainly for the way it handles presentation and searching of saved clips).
I think I've spent £30.80 on Alfred during the last 11 years, so I'm doing less than three quid a year. It's basically one of the first things I always install on a new Mac. Never needed a separate clipboard manager because of it either.
I use TextClipboardHistory because it has Maccy’s current feature set, but is hackable via Lua and is a Hammerspoon Spoon. being a spoon will automatically install it, not clutter my /Applications dir, and easily use VCS to maintain my configuration for it.
I've been using CopyQ for years as well. It took a while to setup and the preferences UX is messy, but it has lots of customization options, and results in the best UX imo.
Maccy has pretty poor visuals when copy pasting images, rich text, etc. I find it important to visualize the actual look of some media when looking for it in the history. CopyQ is amazing at that.
I used to use Maccy with Alfred a while back and it was great. love how it doesn't get in the way and just works
however if you want both in one without paying for the Alfred powerpack, I highly recommend Raycast. Alfred powerpack could of course be worth the price, but I find Raycast nicer with its extensions more suited to me.
> however if you want both in one without paying for the Alfred powerpack, I highly recommend Raycast.
Came here to post this. I'm a convert to Raycast (free, proprietary) from Alfred with Power Pack, but Raycast is stellar. It's got a searchable Clipboard History, and additionally you can filter by type (text, images, files, links, colors).
People always say "just use alfred" but I mostly use Mac as an excuse to get a Unix terminal at work and don't really use or need a large addon like Alfred even though I can see how one might.
For me all I need is the clipboard functionality and as a clipboard manager maccy is the best. Highly advise people to install it and if they like it buy the app store version to help it's development.
My only reservations with clipboard managers are that I still do a lot of password transfer using the clipboard. If only my last copy is resident in memory then the risk seems low, but if it retains all of my history then it seems quite risky.
How do people using these apps manage this problem? Is everyone completely using password manager auto-fill instead?
I like iClip [1] for this purpose, for one substantial reason: You can use the "left-arrow" icon on each history box to past the unstyled (that is, plain text with no fonts, colors, sizes, etc.) version of whatever text is in that box.
https://github.com/TermiT/Flycut mentions needing System Preferences -> Security & Privacy -> Privacy -> Accessibility access; how is Maccy able to function without it?
I'm always trying to avoid additional tools, menubar apps, running at all times whenever possible. Alfred served many other purposes and with the PowerPack, the clipboard manager can be unlocked. This is one good option to try it out. I wrote about it some time back https://brajeshwar.com/2014/access-clipboard-history-alfred-...
I've occasionally been interested in playing with clipboard managers, but I've always been stopped by the fact that at least a few times a day, I copy something I don't want a persistent record of (e.g. a password). How do other people deal with this? Do you just accept that your clipboard manager will save copies of all your passwords? Do you exclusively use an auto-type solution that doesn't use copy/paste? Something else?
Ditto is good but I am partial to the user interface of an AutoHotkey program called ClipJump[1]. The main functions are all accessible with the regular Ctrl and ZXC keys, in the normal flow. Pressing Ctrl+V while holding Ctrl down brings up a tooltip with the current item on the clipboard, and you can move backwards and forwards through the stack by tapping C and V (while still holding Ctrl). Tapping X switches actions (Paste, Cancel, Delete, Delete All), and releasing Ctrl commits the action. It's so intuitive that it makes other clipboard managers feel clunky. And tapping Z strips the text formatting.
While it is written in AutoHotkey and hasn't seen any updates in 8 years, it still works perfectly under Windows 11. The code is pure spaghetti and filled with goto statements and global variables and trying to understand it is a lost cause, but despite that it's almost bug-free and covers all of the corner cases, including copying from zip files, Microsoft Office documents, images, files, etc. Way back when it was just someone's project on the AHK forums I contributed a couple of fixes to it, before it was so complex.
as a user of Maccy, yes anything you put on the clipboard will be an entry in plain text. Maybe there is a way to do a 'secure' copy with Maccy but I'm not using it so I can view my passwords via the buffer.
edits: I guess this is only the case when you copy the plain-text. Seems there are event types associated with the copied target that Maccy will ignore if it believes it is a 'confidential type' Check the GitHub README
I've been using Maccy for about a year now, after Quicksilver inexplicably decided to stop working on one of my comps. Even though subsequent updates have fixed Qucksilver, I still keep Maccy around for the clipboard features. So much more user-friendly than Quicksilver's were.
So thanks for creating Maccy and double thanks for making it free!
Not sure about Maccy, but I’ve been using „Copy’em” (https://apprywhere.com/ce-mac.html) for last few years and been really happy with it. I highly recommend it if someone is looking for something like this.
But I had to move to using a Mac and Linux ecosystem. I found and adopted CopyQ, which then became my main clipboard manager, and which then supplanted Ditto as my clipboard of choice. I highly recommend CopyQ. It's great.
I've been using Ditto for a really long time on Windows too.
I recently had to use macOS for work (company issued MBP) and Maccy was the only clipboard manager I could find that was similar to Ditto.
It opens a tiny fuzzy searchable menu next to your cursor where you can quickly find a previously copied item to paste. That's all I really wanted from a clipboard manager.
None of CopyQ's screenshots show that behavior. Its list of features also doesn't mention searching. Does it do all of the above except the marketing page and docs are bad at showing those things off? Also does is support's Ditto's ability to let you have a hotkey for pasting and a separate hotkey for pasting without formatting?
Have I been waiting in vain for Apple to steal all the best clipboard ideas and roll them into Finder? For whatever their reasons for annual upgrades, isn't it inevitable that Apple will at some point give us a modern clipboard?
Emacs, for instance, has this amazing kill-ring feature for decades - around 40 years. It is not a modern concept. I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple had this too someday, but removed for better ux.
I thought they've been the endeavor to new useful day to day features but somehow they're not putting a clipboard manager yet even when Windows now has a native one.
[+] [-] kitsunesoba|3 years ago|reply
[0]: https://www.alfredapp.com
[+] [-] defulmere|3 years ago|reply
With this feature you can, for example, copy a bunch of different items from a web page on to the stack, then paste them sequentially in a web form and pop them from the stack so that they're no longer in the clipboard history. With this workflow there's no hopping back and forth between pages, you do all of the copying at once in one place and all of the pasting at once in the other. It all happens via keyboard shortcuts, no interaction with the LaunchBar UI at all.
This feature is what's been keeping me on LaunchBar for almost 15 years now. Alfred looks great, but without this push/pop feature in the clipboard manager I'd have a hard time switching.
[0]: https://obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html
[+] [-] mjmsmith|3 years ago|reply
[1] https://pasteapp.io
[+] [-] Hamuko|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] droopyEyelids|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vladdoster|3 years ago|reply
https://www.hammerspoon.org/Spoons/TextClipboardHistory.html
example of configuration (also installs it)
https://github.com/vladdoster/hammerspoon-configuration/blob...
[+] [-] hiepph|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tcmb|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shadeless|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lwouis|3 years ago|reply
Maccy has pretty poor visuals when copy pasting images, rich text, etc. I find it important to visualize the actual look of some media when looking for it in the history. CopyQ is amazing at that.
[+] [-] bbkane|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pzrsa|3 years ago|reply
however if you want both in one without paying for the Alfred powerpack, I highly recommend Raycast. Alfred powerpack could of course be worth the price, but I find Raycast nicer with its extensions more suited to me.
[+] [-] CharlesW|3 years ago|reply
Came here to post this. I'm a convert to Raycast (free, proprietary) from Alfred with Power Pack, but Raycast is stellar. It's got a searchable Clipboard History, and additionally you can filter by type (text, images, files, links, colors).
[+] [-] crossroadsguy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cosmiccatnap|3 years ago|reply
For me all I need is the clipboard functionality and as a clipboard manager maccy is the best. Highly advise people to install it and if they like it buy the app store version to help it's development.
[+] [-] alsko|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] latchkey|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zmmmmm|3 years ago|reply
How do people using these apps manage this problem? Is everyone completely using password manager auto-fill instead?
[+] [-] dhaya|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] totetsu|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chris_st|3 years ago|reply
1: http://iclipapp.com
[+] [-] password4321|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nchase|3 years ago|reply
Aside: even after getting this prompt, I don't see an option to choose Maccy in the System Preferences -> Accessibility menu, hmm...
PS: I'm a huge Flycut fan – clipboard management massively improves my life, and it's the best clipboard manager that I've found.
[+] [-] crossroadsguy|3 years ago|reply
Unlike many other top comments here I prefer dedicated smaller tools for individual tasks.
[+] [-] Brajeshwar|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rcthompson|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leokennis|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frosted-flakes|3 years ago|reply
While it is written in AutoHotkey and hasn't seen any updates in 8 years, it still works perfectly under Windows 11. The code is pure spaghetti and filled with goto statements and global variables and trying to understand it is a lost cause, but despite that it's almost bug-free and covers all of the corner cases, including copying from zip files, Microsoft Office documents, images, files, etc. Way back when it was just someone's project on the AHK forums I contributed a couple of fixes to it, before it was so complex.
[1] http://clipjump.sourceforge.net/
[+] [-] david_allison|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] monkey_monkey|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pineconewarrior|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxyurk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zenlf|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oangemangut|3 years ago|reply
edits: I guess this is only the case when you copy the plain-text. Seems there are event types associated with the copied target that Maccy will ignore if it believes it is a 'confidential type' Check the GitHub README
[+] [-] zzkt|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Normille|3 years ago|reply
So thanks for creating Maccy and double thanks for making it free!
[+] [-] szastamasta|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] knighthack|3 years ago|reply
But I had to move to using a Mac and Linux ecosystem. I found and adopted CopyQ, which then became my main clipboard manager, and which then supplanted Ditto as my clipboard of choice. I highly recommend CopyQ. It's great.
[+] [-] nickjj|3 years ago|reply
I recently had to use macOS for work (company issued MBP) and Maccy was the only clipboard manager I could find that was similar to Ditto.
It opens a tiny fuzzy searchable menu next to your cursor where you can quickly find a previously copied item to paste. That's all I really wanted from a clipboard manager.
None of CopyQ's screenshots show that behavior. Its list of features also doesn't mention searching. Does it do all of the above except the marketing page and docs are bad at showing those things off? Also does is support's Ditto's ability to let you have a hotkey for pasting and a separate hotkey for pasting without formatting?
[+] [-] Maursault|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] allarm|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mekster|3 years ago|reply