Jumpcut: Free OS X Clipboard History Utility

Jumpcut is a very handyÂ clipboard extender for Mac OS X. What Jumpcut does is remember a user-specified number of text items copied to the clipboard, and allows one to select from them when pasting.

The standard OS X clipboard allows the user to paste only the last-copied item. Jumpcut just keeps track of everything you have copied using the Command (âŒ˜) -C shortcut or the Edit -> Copy menu item.

I find Jumpcut particularly useful when composing blog posts, emails or other text related documents where I will be including a number of URLs. It’s also quite handy when doing layout design edits, copying the many client revisions from an email or PDF sticky note, and then heading over to your graphics or layout application and pasting in the items in their respective sections. Much easier than copying & pasting back and forth from one application to the other.

There are quite a few other clipboard utilities, most of which offer additional features, but also additional bloat and extraneous floating windows. Most of them are also not free. Jumpcut has a clean user interface, as seen to the left; when invoking the user-specified keyboard shortcut (mine is set to Control-Option-V), the bezel overlay is shown and by using the arrow keys, you can cycle through all the recent items added to the clipboard via Copy. There is also a menubar item which stores these as well, and when clicked gives a visual list of the actual text in the clipboard history.

I have read some gripes about Jumpcut not supporting images, but for me the text functionality serves my purposes 99% of the time.

by George Coghill -
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