A flux capacitor for your clipboard

How many times have you pressed Command-C, only to realize that you forgot to paste the last thing you copied? And now it’s been copied over, so it’s no longer in your clipboard, and if you still want to paste it somewhere, you gotta go find it and re-copy it first. Sure, it’s a simple mistake, but the consequences can range from annoying to disastrous, depending on what you’re working on at the time. But what if your clipboard had the same DeLorean-like time-traveling capabilities of Apple’s Time Machine?

With CopyPaste Pro you can add this functionality -- and more -- to the copy and paste features you use every day. CopyPaste Pro sits in your menu bar ready for action at a moment’s notice. Click on its icon, and you’ll be shown a list of items you have copied to your clipboard. Clips can include anything from text to images as well as audio and video, all of which can be pasted from the CopyPaste Pro menu and into a document or the Finder.

CopyPaste Pro has a wealth of features, but you’re guaranteed to use the Clip History daily

But CopyPaste Pro goes beyond just copying and pasting. For clips you think you’ll use more than once, CopyPaste Pro allows you to add items to the Clip Archive by adding a single digit to the normal Command-C shortcut. Then you can reuse clips at any time using Command-V and the number you assigned to it. That’s a huge time-saver; we were able to get rid of a couple text files we were keeping just to hold such frequently pasted chunks of text. Holding down Command and moving your cursor to the right of your screen activates a Clip Palette for viewing all of your stored clips. As if these extra features weren’t enough, CopyPaste Pro also includes a text editor, as well as some incredibly useful shortcuts that allow you to save selections as a file, extract email addresses from a passage of text, and capitalize all words in a passage, among many others.

While the basic storing of copied items is a no-brainer, making use of the advanced functions and additional shortcuts and menus will need a little training. After a week or so of use, we found archiving and viewing clips became almost second nature. If we had to go back to copying and pasting the old way, it would trigger painful withdrawal.

The bottom line. CopyPaste Pro is probably the most useful tool that you never knew you needed. Its indispensable features truly enhance the productivity of your day-to-day work, though remembering all the shortcuts can be a bit challenging. At $30, it’s a bit pricey for a fancy clipboard, but it can quickly pay for itself in time saved.