You should use a clipboard manager
A clipboard manager is a tool that stores your clipboard history so you can access previously copied items and quickly load them into your clipboard.
Any time you copy something, it's automatically added to your clipboard history. The history can store many days' worth of clipboard entires, and it can store not only copied text, but copied images. You can open the clipboard manager with a keyboard shortcut, then search your entire clipboard history by substring match.
And it's awesome.
Why they rule #
- If I'm writing a long entry into a form and I'm worried I might lose my work, I copy the text, knowing now it's safely in my clipboard history
- When writing a message and decide I want to send it later, I just copy it and I can get it from the clipboard history later
- When writing a message and I decide I don't want to send it, but maybe I'll change my mind and want to send it, I copy it anyway so I have access to it just in case
- Hours, days, weeks later, if I'm trying to remember the name of that PHP class I was working on, I type some substring of it into my clipboard manager, and it'll probably pull up the whole name
- I never worry about accidentally copying something new and losing something important that was in my clipboard
- When taking a bunch of screenshots in a row, I don't have to worry about storing the intermediate values. I just Ctrl-Command-Shift-4 to copy as many images to my clipboard as I need, then retrieve them for pasting as I need them
- If I need a terminal command I ran yesterday that I copied from some wiki, I just type a substring of the command into my clipboard history to find it
- I can even find things I didn't think I'd need a second time. As long as I copied it at some point, it's remembered for me
There's SO many use cases that I know the above list is incomplete.
Having a clipboard manager fundamentally changes your relationship to the clipboard. You'll discover workflows you never realized you needed. It feels like a superpower[1].
Give it a try and I doubt you'll ever go back.
Which one? #
On Mac, I primarily use the clipboard manager built into the paid app Alfred. A free alternative is Maccy. When I was using Windows, I used Ditto.
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