How to Use the Clipboard

Copy and paste is absolutely essential for productivity. It may sound strange, but without such functionality, we’d have to start from scratch on whatever we are working on. Copy and paste gives us control, flexibility, and functionality. It saves us so much time and effort, it is something we often take for granted that we fail to appreciate it.

How to Use the Clipboard in Windows

You can copy (Ctrl+C) and paste (Ctrl+v) text, images or other data between your files and programs. But what if you want to paste an earlier copied item.

You can activate the Windows built-in Clipboard Manager under Settings, Clipboard, and then make sure the toggle is ON in the Clipboard history. To get to your clipboard history at any time, press Windows + V. It will open a little pop-up window at the bottom right of your desktop showing you recent items you have copied to your clipboard.

Then, you can paste it. To paste an item from the clipboard, left-click on it. Besides, you can pin frequently used items (it keeps an item from being removed from the clipboard history) and delete pinned items.  

Third-party apps

• Ditto is an advanced clipboard manager for Windows.
• CopyQ is an advanced clipboard manager for Linux, Windows, and OS X 10.15+. Installation: choco install copyq (Windows), brew install ‐‐cask copyq (macOS), sudo apt install copyq (Ubuntu), sudo pacman -S copyq (Arch)

How to Use the Clipboard in macOS

To copy and paste content with the clipboard, you highlight or select text or an image, hit Edit, Copy (Cmd + C) or Cut (Cmd + X) in the application you are currently using, and then you can Edit, Paste (Cmd + V) wherever you want. It is not a particular impressive feature. You can copy something, and then paste it somewhere else, that’s pretty much it!

What are your best options?

• Alfred is a launcher for macOS, which boosts your efficiency with hotkeys, keywords, and text expansion. The basic version of the Alfred application is free and allows you to search and start applications, make dictionary queries (define word, spell word), search files locally (find myFile), search on the web (google query, twitter query, bing query), control your system (logout, sleep, restart, shutdown, trash, emptytrash, etc.), and access your clipboard.

  To access your clipboard history, launch Alfred (by default is option + space) and type “clipboard” or option + command + c. If you want to paste a particular item into your current application, choose it and hit return.

• Flycut is a clean, simple, and open source clipboard manager. Every time you copy some text, Flycut store it in its history. Later on, you can paste it using Shift + Command + V.
• Jumpcut is a free and open source macOS clipboard manager that provides Mac users with quick, intuitive access to their clipboard history. To get at a clipping, choose one from under the Jumpcut menu item or set a global hotkey (the default value is Control + Option + V).
• Other options are: CopyClip but there is no hotkey to access your clipboard history; and Clipy -Cmd + Shift + V-.

How to Use the Clipboard in GNU/Linux

• CopyQ is an advanced clipboard manager for Linux, Windows, and macOS. To start the application, double-click the program icon (1), open the Applications menu, look up copyq (2) or open a terminal window and run the copyq command (3).

Copying text or images to your clipboard will create new items on your clipboard history. This history or list is accessible by clicking on the system tray or running copyq toggle (it shows/hides copyq’s main window). The items in the list can be edited (F2 or Edit), removed (Delete), rearranged (Ctrl + Up/Down), copied back to your clipboard (Ctrl+C), and pasted (use the arrow keys to navigate the list and hit Enter to paste the item).

Albert is a free desktop agnostic launcher. Besides, you can use it to access your CopyQ clipboard history very quickly. 1. CopyQ needs to be installed and running on your system. 2 Enable this extension: Settings, Extensions, Python, CopyQ. 3 Use it: Type cq followed by a space.

• GPaste, Klipper, and Clipman are the best clipboard managers for Gnome, KDE, and XFCE desktops respectively.
• greenclip is another clipboard manager. It keeps track of your history of selections to quickly switch between them.

1. Installation: yay rofi-greenclip (Arch).
2. Spawn the greenclip daemon (~/.config/i3/config): exec ‐‐no-startup-id greenclip daemon>/dev/null
3. To access your clipboard history, type: rofi -modi “clipboard:greenclip print” -show clipboard -run-command ‘{cmd}’