Review: Clipboard History

Product: Clipboard History v 1.1.29
Manufacturer: Agile Route
Date Reviewed: April 18, 2011
Retail Price: FREE

Clipboard History, from Agile Route, is a freeware program that keeps track of your history of copied items and gives you a user-defined hotkey to paste them inside any app. The copied items can be images, rich text (like PDFs and HTML), regular text, or a mix between all of them. Why even bother installing it? Well, the built-in Mac clipboard only stores one item at a time. Clipboard History lets you keep up to 100 clippings within easy reach. That’s pretty handy for anyone who copies and pastes a lot of data.

I’ve tried many clipboard programs over the years, but none of them have been as slick or intuitive as Clipboard History. So why do I like this program so much?

For starters, I can access it two ways:

1. Via a user-defined hotkey from anywhere on my desktop or within any application
2. Via the menubar

The Clipboard History menu makes finding and retrieving clipboard items super simple. Each clipping has a label to the left of it. Clippings can be images, text, HTML, or RTFD (Rich Text). On the right of each clipping is a keyboard shortcut. You can either use the mouse to select the clipping, or use the keyboard shortcut to paste the clipping where you want it.

Okay. I lied. There’s a third way, and that’s from within the application itself. Within the Clipboard History app, I can also perform a search to find the right clipping. Very handy!

Clipboard History can be set to load at launch, with the application icon appearing in the dock, menubar, or both. In my testing, I was unable to hide the dock icon with the Menu Bar option selected. (I tried quitting and relaunching the app, as suggested in the documentation, but that didn’t do anything for me.)

You can choose to start up Clipboard History at login and even set your own custom Paste Hotkey. (I use Control-C.)

Outside of the bug I experienced with hiding the dock icon, everything else worked flawlessly. Clipboard History has been a huge time-saver for me. Instead of opening up an intermediary application window to paste items, I can now eliminate that step with a quick invocation of Clipboard History.

Which brings me to two minor niggles I have with this app. It has nothing to do with how the app itself functions – rather, it’s the design of the Application’s icon and About dialog (shown below). They’re both quite garrish, in my opinion. For as elegant as this application feels in day-to-day use, the cluttered About dialog just makes me sad.

Clipboard History has a lot of great things going for it: It’s easy to use and configure and does what its supposed to do. It gets out of my way and makes me more productive. Did I mention this program is free?

If you have a Mac running Snow Leopard, do yourself a huge favor and grab Clipboard History. You won’t regret it.

Clipboard History earns a 4.5 out of 5 Bob Weiners.

-Krishna

Krishna April 18, 2011 clipboard, copy and paste software, Mac applications