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If you grew up in a Windows household in the 90s or 00s, you are sure to remember Clippy. Clippy was Word’s built-in “helper,” but he never really did much to help out. Clippy came pre-installed with Microsoft Office bundles from 1997-2003, and just wasn’t intelligent enough to be of much use. “It looks like you’re writing a letter” never sounded more annoying. Whenever I hear the word “clipboard,” I think of Clippy. The horror! One thing that doesn’t make me angry, however, is the Mac app CopyClip.
What is it and what does it do
Main Functionality
CopyClip is an Mac app that lets you view and manage your clipboard history that lives in your menu bar.
Pros
- Takes up very little space on your hard drive, and keeps a low profile by running in your menu bar
- Sleek interface that makes it easy to find snippets of text you’ve copied and pasted previously
- Cool ability to “blacklist” certain apps from appearing in your copy/paste clipboard history
Cons
- No ideal for older Macs: you need to be running Lion or higher for this app to work on your Mac
Discussion
CopyClip is a sleek app that runs almost unnoticed on your Mac. Like all good menu bar apps, it’s there when you need it, and not in your face when you don’t want to look at it. I love the UI here: it’s clear, concise, and easy.
From a simple drop-down menu, you can select from pieces of text that you copied earlier. In the Preferences menu, you can set how many clippings you want the app to display, and how many you want it to remember. The Preferences menu also lets you start the recording of clipboard pieces at startup.
Without question, the highlight of this tiny little menu bar app is the “blacklist” feature. Anything that has been copied in a “blackilisted” app won’t be saved in your clipboard manager history. This is a great way to filter out clippings from certain tools and activities, ensuring that only the most relevant clipboard history items are shown.
Overall, CopyClip is a supremely simple little app. If you’ve ever been frustrated because you couldn’t access a copy/paste item from earlier in your day, this app takes care of that pesky little problem.
Conclusion and download link
If you’re anything like me, you probably copy and paste dozens of items in a given day. URLs, quotes, snippets of code, emails, words you want to ensure that you’ve spelled correctly: all this and more will show up in your clipboard history. There’s no more hunting through your history to find the site you were quoting from for a report, or frantically trying to reconstruct a bit of code that you forgot to save. CopyClip makes your clipboard better than ever.
Price: Free
Version reviewed: 1.2
Supported OS: OS X 10.7 or later
Download size: 1.2 MB
