About AutoClips

AutoClips keeps a history of things you have cut or copied to the Mac pasteboard. You can then retrieve previous clippings with ease.

There are several ways of accessing this history:

• You can set a hot key which brings up a window which you can use to cycle through your recent clippings. By default this hot key is Option-Command-V. When the window pops up you can cycle through the clippings by continuing to press Option-Command-V, or you can use the up and down arrow keys to go back and forth.
  • Without Sticky Mode, when you release the hot key (specifically, the control, option, shift and command keys) the current clipping is pasted into your current document and the window disappears. If you changeingenious architecture
  • In Sticky Mode, the window hangs around until you make a selection, unless...
  • If the window is Pinned, the window hangs around until it is dismissed. In this case you can continue to paste selections either by double clicking or by dragging and dropping. Option drag copies as plain text.
  • You can delete clippings here with the delete key.


How to set the popup hot key

1. Select the Store in the Clipboard Stores list that you want to set the hot key for.
2. From the action menu [] select Store Options.
3. Click on the Popup hot key field, and type your hot key. Use a key combination that either is a function key, or includes at least Command or Control. (Option key only plus letters tend to be used already to generate special characters).


• If you have Automaton active in the status bar, Clips appears in the menu, or if you have it active in the dock, it appears in the dock menu. Your recent clippings are listed in the menu, and they are also grouped by application (if they are from different applications) as well as by OS-X Workspace (aka "Spaces"), if they came from different spaces. By selecting a clipping from the menu it is pasted into your curent application. If you hold down the Option key while selecting the clip from the menu, it will paste it as plaintext and not rich text.




Opening the AutoClips Window



• If you bring up the Clips configuration window, you can see all your clippings listed in detail. You can select one and press "Copy to Pasteboard". The Clips configuration window can be opened from the Preferences pane, and double clicking the autoclips file. You can press the Copy to Pasteboard button here to copy your clips to the Pasteboard, or you can drag and drop them into your documents. Option-drag copies them as plain text.

Store Options

Each Store in the configuration window also has some options that you can access from the action menu [].

• Listen to Pasteboard determines whether this set of clips is automatically updated from the pasteboard, or whether it is a user created set of clips.
• For listen to pasteboard stores, you can limit the number of items stored and shown in the menu.

Add Clip From Pasteboard

The Store action menu [] has an item Add Clip From Pasteboard Sometimes an application will store things in its pasteboard in proprietary formats and you can't get the right paste without these formates. But there is no way to create this in the RTF based edit window. MS-Word 2011 seems to be an example here, (and one could consider this a bug in Word 2011) that some formatting doesn't paste correctly from TextEdit to Word. In this case, you can copy your text in Word, and manually add it to a Store using Add Clip From Pasteboard which will then preserve various internal proprietary formats, and allow pastes to work correctly.

Sort Order

By default AutoClips sorts clips in reverse chronological order. The lastest clips are at the top. You can change the sort order in the AutoClips window by clicking the titles of columns. Changing the order also affects the sort order in the popup window as well as the menu.

The User Order column allows you to set a user specified order for your clips. You can rearrange the order by drag and drop as long as sorting is based on User Order.

About the Clippings

Many Mac applications copy data to the pasteboard in a number of different formats. Usually it will include at least plain text, and often rich text, but it could include any number of other formats as well, some of which may be application specific.

AutoClips records all the different formats which are stored in the Pasteboard, and it restores all the formats when you paste them back. However it can only display rich text and plain text in the AutoClips menu and popups. But if the receiving application understands other types, they will be restored correctly.

See also

AutoClips Configuration