Clipboard History is the Future

The concept had genuinely never occurred to me until only a few years ago when a coworker noticed my struggle to juggle different things I had copied from various places while performing different operations during a maintenance. I would Alt+Tab into my Notepad++ to copy a shell command, back into the terminal, execute that, switch to my password manager, yank the password I needed for a particular set of servers to fulfill that earlier command, paste that into the command line, switch over to my browser where I had been monitoring the status of my deployment, remember I was about to query for a specific server, jump to another program, copy a hostname I had previously already copied, paste that into the other monitoring tool, paste the hostname into Notepad++ in a massive and unorganized file, in case I would need it again, rinse and repeat for several servers, and on and on... I had become pretty adept at performing these monotonous and repetitive tasks at lightning speed, but witnessing this in action had brought upon a visceral reaction to my coworker.

"Dude, why are you not using a clipboard manager?" I remember his words and tone of voice vividly. I admit I acted a little on the defensive, since I was simply working the way I was quite used to, and that was perfectly fine by me. He however, not forcing me to do anything I didn't want to, simply made the bold claim that he "never copies anything more than once".

I was receptive to his passion on the topic and inquired a bit further. Honestly, it doesn't take a ton of critical thinking to imagine how a clipboard history manager would improve your life. Upon being shown just how smoothly it worked, I was sold pretty quickly.

I went ahead to install the Ditto Clipboard Manager and I can confidently say that right from the start it became one of those very minor but life changing things that I felt everybody should know about. I can't work on a computer without clipboard history anymore. That's simply how much I rely on it.

I shudder at the fact that prior to this revelation, I was actually quite nervous about copying things into my clipboard at all. I hesitated with each Ctrl+C, feeling that whatever was currently in the clipboard must have had some degree of importance and that I ought to save it for later, if I hadn't already pasted it into my messy Notepad++ buffer. Embarrassing as it is to admit, but reflecting on those times, I certainly had a somewhat obsessive behavior surrounding my preservation of the clipboard, and in that constant quest to keep its usage to a minimum, I only restricted my own productivity. I can candidly admit now that working without clipboard history for me, was debilitating, and by adopting this technology, I was saved from that.

Ditto was great for Windows, but of course the next step was to investigate the options for Mac. While Ditto was the de-facto choice on Windows, there didn't seem to be a clear winner for Mac that wasn't paid. I eventually stumbled upon Maccy, which these days seems to have the most traction among open source options. It's got a great user experience for such a simple kind of application. I highly recommend it.

I took it to the next level of course and started pushing my close friends and family to jump on the band wagon, as I had previously done over password managers¹ many more years ago. It was only when going to set up Ditto on my partner's work laptop that I discovered that Windows has had built-in support for clipboard history since Windows 10! I'm not certain if Windows 10 launched with the feature all the way back in 2015, but I found an answer to a community question indicating the feature is likely to at least date back to 2018. The more you know.

So what is this all about then? Well, I guess all I really intended with this post was to give a short PSA about the joy of using a clipboard history manager and that I think everybody should subscribe to its use. Sure, it's not as vital as a password manager. There are plenty of other crucially important tools we should all know about. But I believe that clipboard history is such a great quality of life improvement for daily workflows that it should be ubiquitous. Everybody should know of its existence the way everybody has Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V burned into their muscle memory.

So what are you waiting for? Overwrite your copy/paste habits and get using the clipboard history.