Best Open Source: Dittoĭitto has been around for years and still ranks among the best clipboard managers for Windows. Here are our favorite options in a few distinct categories for both desktop and mobile.

With that said once you’ve added a clipboard manager into you workflow you’ll see that they can be major time savers and can offer a big productivity boost, especially if you routinely have to re-copy snippets of text. It’s a good idea not to store passwords and other sensitive information in there. While saving the contents of your clipboard to your hard drive for days, weeks, even years might be convenient it can also be a potential security risk if someone gains access to your computer. They’re useful when researching online to collect snippets of texts and useful URLs in a central place before organising your thoughts or anything you’re working on.Ī word of caution, though. The main use case for a clipboard manager is to keep a history of what you’ve copied and being able to keep dozens or hundreds of clips readily available for pasting as long as you need them, even after rebooting your computer. The clipboard has evolved significantly throughout the years, but for all its usefulness, operating systems like Windows and macOS seem content with offering basic functionality and letting power users with more specific needs use third party clipboard managers. The act of transferring text from one part of a computer-based document to a different location within the same or different computer-based document was a part of the earliest on-line computer editors in the mid to late 1960s, though it was all command based.Įngineers at Xerox PARC later coined the names 'cut' and 'copy' for the first step and 'paste' for the second step of the process and implemented it into several text editors, while Apple mapped the functionalities to key combinations consisting of the Command key held down while typing the letters X (for Cut), C (for Copy), and V (for Paste), widely popularising its use through the Lisa and Macintosh operating systems in the early 1980s.Īnother factoid: Appropriately for this article, I copied, pasted, and edited bits and pieces from this Wikipedia page and this Quora answer to bring you that nugget of computer history. It is one of the greatest features the point and click interface brought to personal computers, and you don’t need to understand the mechanics behind this invisible, temporary storage system in order to copy and paste your way through text, images, files and folders. The clipboard is a fundamental part of any modern operating system that even the least tech inclined are familiar with.

Mac clipboard manager encryption