For something so essential to everyday computing, the clipboard tool is actually pretty limited. After all these years, it can still only handle one thing at a time. Copy or cut something new, and the previous contents of the clipboard are lost. Fortunately, there are both Windows and Mac tools available that will let you upgrade your clipboard experience.
Android: Copying text on your phone is already a pain, but bouncing back and forth between apps just to make a call is an even bigger hassle. Easy Copy helps fix this by letting you launch actions on your text, such as making a phone call or searching for an address.
iOS: You wouldn't really think a clipboard manager would be that helpful in iOS, but Clips is a new app that proves that thought wrong. It allows you to easily cut, copy and access clipboard history from anywhere in iOS.
Android: Clipboards are notoriously difficult to deal with on mobile devices. If you need to copy text from multiples sources, you can forget about it, unless you're using StuffMerge.
Android: Copy Bubble is a clipboard manager with a floating icon that makes it easy to copy text or images in one app and paste it in another. When Copy Bubble is active, you can copy data as you normally would. The counter on the icon will fill up as you copy more things.
Windows: In the world of clipboard managers, there's no shortage of options. Clipjump makes a strong argument with multiple channels you can swap between of clipboard history.
When PopClip was first released for the Mac, it was a mostly cosmetic facelift to how copy and paste works. However, a recent update added support for extensions, and now it serves as a great addition to your workflow. Here's how to use it.
Mac: When you're in the middle of a research project and bouncing all types of text between different applications, it's tough to speed up the process. Liquid Information is a launcher-style app that speeds up transferring text between apps, searching and translating.
Chrome: If you use multiple computers, you might occasionally find the need to get your clipboard text from one computer to another. Clipboard Sync is a Chrome extension that makes it easy to copy text to any computer using Chrome.
Mac: Dragging and dropping folders and files is one of the easiest ways to move things around on a Mac, but the problem with it is that you have to have a destination folder ready. DragonDrop is a simple app that adds a holding bin to store data so you can find the destination folder easier.
I'm so used to Control-C for copy, Control-X for cut and Control-V for paste that it never occurred to me that other options (such as the Edit menu or right-clicking) don't always work in web-based applications like Google Docs. Google Operating System points out this flaw, which is almost unavoidable because of browser security requirements.
Ordinarily, you can't copy text from a Windows popup or error message. GetWindowText is a tiny portable app that will let you grab the text from any window so you can easily Google that message.
Mac: If you love the tap and copy functionality of iOS and want it on your home computer, PopClip is a simple app that adds similar functionality to your copying, pasting and other functions.
Mac: We've mentioned before how Ctrl+Shift+V in Windows can strip the formatting from text and paste it in almost any application, but if you have a Mac, FormatMatch is the menubar utility for you.
Windows: Sharing a good quote or image on Facebook or sending it to Simplenote takes an annoying amount of clicks. Click.to lets you pipe just about anything you copy to your clipboard to a number of desktop apps and online services.
USB memory sticks (also known as flash drives or thumb drives) are handy little storage devices that make transferring files between computers very easy. Beginning computer users may not know how to use a USB memory stick, however, so this guide is for you to share with them.
There may not be a pure keyboard shortcut to do it (actually, there is -- Oz ed), but Mac OS X does allow copying and pasting of files—by using the mouse and the Option key. Normally, the default system behaviour would just move a file that's dragged by the mouse, but doing this will cause it to make a copy of the file, just as though you had used the copy/paste functions in an app.
One of the nicer but relatively unknown features of Mac OS X is its ability to create text clippings. Text clippings are basically selections of text that have been saved for later, and can be dropped into another document (or even a form box in a browser) at any time. It's a bit like the layby version of Copy and Paste, and all you have to do to create one is drag some highlighted text to the desktop.
