📋 The Benefits of Clipboard Management

A good clipboard manager and using it correctly is a massive increase to productivity. You can save time by copying multiple text items at once, then paste them together without wasting time switching back and forth between apps.

You can also look back a few hours, days, or even weeks to get text you previously worked with. Most managers can collect dozens or hundreds of items before text falls off the list.

CopyLess 2 is my choice of manager. It can support 100-1000 entries, can remove all text formatting, has a favorites tab, offers search, and runs as a floating window that stays on top of other apps. That last feature is important to me.

I have multiple monitors and CopyLess runs on the second screen. It offers a list view with preview so I can see the copied information, how long ago I copied it, and what application it can from. If I’ve copied two things that are similar, I can see which is which.

When working on automation development or QA work, I copy hundreds of things. In some cases I need to go back to something I did earlier in the day. CopyLess handles that easily because of the floating window. I don’t need to hit keyboard combinations to make it appear or only see a few items. I currently see 20 items at a time, including preview.

Another beneficial feature is the serial copy/paste. This is a huge benefit when you need to copy a lot of information from one app and paste it into specific places in another. Or copying info from multiple sources and pasting it into one destination.

By using a hotkey, CopyLess remembers your copy order. When you paste, each item is pasted back in order starting from 1. If you copy Name, Address, City, it will paste back, Name, Address, City.

If you notice, this is slightly different because it would normally paste in reverse, City, Address, Name, last copied-first pasted.

Clipboard managers save a huge amount of time and there are dozens available for the Mac. Alfred has one built in, which I really should investigate using. I may have gone with an alternative because Alfred wouldn’t stay open as a separate window. I’ll have to look into that again.

However, there are dozens of choices and combinations of features, but a clipboard manager is one of the best tools you can get for yourself if you move back and forth between apps to paste information.

It's bad luck to be superstitious.

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