Unlock This Hidden Clipboard on Mac

The clipboard is one of the most basic and essential features on macOS. You no doubt understand the basics: cut, copy and paste. But do you know you can Kill and Yank an item in clipboard? How about access multiple items in the clipboard history or paste with special formatting? If not, read on!

How To Use Hidden Secondary Clipboard on Mac

Basic Clipboard

Command+C
Press Command/⌘+C to copy a passage of text, an entire document, a file/folder, or code.

Command+V
Press Command/⌘+V to paste everything that has been copied in clipboard.

Hidden Clipboard

Control+K
Press Control+K to Kill selected texts without moving them to clipboard.

Control+Y
Control+Y works exactly like a paste command to Yank and undo killed texts.

The Secret Of This Magic

This secondary clipboard is derived from some Emacs features that are present in OS X, namely kill and yank. About Emacs, it is a very powerful text processor, giving you the power to manipulate documents efficiently. Emacs is included in macOS, so you can just use Terminal.app, type `emacs` and you're ready to roll.

How To View Clipboard on Mac

Clipboard runs in the background on macOS. But you can view clipboard through the Finder menu > Edit > Show Clipboard to see the last item you copied.

Paste & Match Style

There are a mess of hidden features and possible improvements surrounding the Mac OS X clipboard. Here is one more simple but extremely useful trick to increase your productivity. In most default Apple applications, you can copy a string of rich text and paste it into the document with a completely same visual style by using Option-Shift-Command-V.

Try Third Party Utilities

Text clippings are handy in some situations, but wouldn't it be far more useful to have access to your full clipboard history? To do this, we're going to have to turn to some third party utilities.

Paste App

Paste automatically stores everything you copy across all your devices and keeps your clipboard history organized.

User Ratings:
4.1 average based on 500+ reviews.

Alfred 4

Alfred is an award-winning app which boosts your efficiency with clipboard, hotkeys, text expansion and more.

User Ratings:
4.1 average based on 293 reviews.

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