
You don’t need this, but it makes Paste nicer to use. App icons are also shown in each item’s title, and you can see quickly whether the copied item is text, an image, or something else. Also, Paste uses color-coding: stuff copied from Safari is blue, stuff copied from Contacts is brown, stuff copied from Pages is purple. For example, by default, Paste does not store information copied from Keychain Access or 1Password, which means your passwords aren’t sitting around waiting for someone to paste them somewhere. Nice touches abound in Paste, showing a lot of thought and care by the developer. The item stays in the main collection but can also be found in the pinboard (click on the pinboard at the top of the Paste screen). Adding items to pinboards is easy too– bring up Paste, then control-click on the item you’re interested in, and “pin” it to a pinboard. ( Paste calls these collections “Pinboards.”) It’s easy to make a new pinboard– just click the large “+” at the top of Paste’s window and name it. You can create collections of copied items to help keep things organized. You can copy a URL from a web page, then a picture from Photos, then some text from an email, and paste it all later. You will quickly get used to NOT worrying about having to paste something right after you’ve copied it. The developer describes Paste this way: Paste keeps everything you’ve ever copied and lets you to use your clipboard history anytime you need it. It’s really easy, and after you’ve done it this way you will wonder how you lived the old way. That eliminated four of the “switch” steps, and as you can quickly figure out, if we had a whole bunch of things to copy and paste, we could save even more steps. copy the second chunk from the web pageĮleven steps! I’m tired just writing about it.Let’s say you want to copy three chunks of text from a web page, and then paste them into an email. It’s powerful and elegant, and it’s quickly become a “can’t live without” thing for me. Paste extends the concept of Copy and Paste by allowing you to save unlimited copied things and paste them anywhere, in any order, at any time. The “you-can-only-paste-what-you-last-copied” problem is solved by an app called Paste. It was a problem in 1984 and it’s still a problem now. Then you have to go back and copy the first thing again so you can paste it. It’s a problem, and a big time-waster, because sometimes you copy something, get distracted before pasting, and then you copy something else, wiping the first thing off the clipboard. That led to (and continues to lead to) lots of back-and-forth when you had (or have) multiple things to copy and paste. As soon as you copied a second thing, the first thing wasn’t available for pasting. The idea was revolutionary when Apple introduced it in 1984 but it had one big limitation: namely you could only paste the very last thing you copied.
#Copy and paste on mac how to#
You know how to copy and paste: first you copy, then you paste. Select the text you want to copy (either by double clicking on a word, or clicking and dragging to select more).
