CopyPaste Pro: The Mother of All Multi-Clipboard Apps

Single copy-and-paste is SO last decade. Ever since the introduction of the first Mac in 1984, users could cut, copy, and paste images and text to a temporary storage area called the Clipboard, which allowed them to easily duplicate and move one item at a time from document to document, application to application. But soon, there arose a need for more clipboards, and an easier way to manage several clips at a time. Enter CopyPaste Pro.

The newest release of CopyPaste Pro has several extremely useful features, including:

Multiple Clips. Hit Command-C multiple times and your selections will be automatically copied to a new Clipboard. Pressing Command-V quickly pastes the contents of the most recent Clipboard to the screen. But press and hold Command-V, and a horizontal menu pops up, where you can scan through your Clipboards in the order they were added using a GUI similar to Cover Flow.

Editable Clips. Easily edit your text clips using Bean, a built-in open source word processor.

History of Clips. As soon as you cut or copy a selection, it is instantly added to a history list. At any time you can go through that list to find an item you copied or cut, even from days ago.

Clip Archives. Create permanent archives for clips that you use frequently, or that are important. Unlike the History of Clips, an Archive will always have the clips you add to it.

Multiple Views. Choose between three ways to interact with your clips: using the handy pop-up graphical browser, a contextual menu, or an icon in the menu bar.

Clip Tools. There are several handy scripts included that can help you do things ranging from extracting email addresses from clips, inserting or converting dates, doing calculations, or performing text transformations like uppercase, word wrap, and removing email quote indents.

I have found CopyPaste Pro to be indispensable when doing research, especially for articles, user manuals, and other documentation where I will often capture screenshots or snippets of text to include with my writing. It’s a snap to make multiple copies to the Clipboard, and then browse through the History of Clips to find the best one. It does take some getting used to, however—in particular, those of us who can do the copy/paste keystrokes with lightning speed will have to learn to pause slightly between keystrokes, or else CopyPaste Pro doesn’t recognize one action over the other, leaving you with the wrong selection on the Clipboard or the wrong thing pasted to your screen. For example, in Safari, I often duplicate the page I’m browsing onto a second tab. In the past, I held down the Command key and hit L (to put the cursor in the Location field), C (to copy), T (for a new Safari tab), and V (to paste the web address). Doing this set of key combinations quickly will only succeed at the first step, putting the cursor in the Location field. To adjust, I now let up on the Command key between each keystroke, and it works fine.

The software has been stable over the past several months, and the developer is quick to fix any bugs that do come up. At one point there was a conflict with another software app that uses Command key combinations, and working together, both companies fixed the incompatibility very quickly.

If you use copy/paste often, do yourself a favor and download the trial of CopyPaste Pro. With its fast, solid performance and an almost infinite number of Clipboards, you’ll never lose track of your clips again. CopyPaste Pro is a Universal Binary, and costs $30 from Script Software.

tag this digg this permalink ping 3 Comments