clippy

A dedicated clipboard manager can be quite an addition to your software collection. Some workflows are more clipboard-intensive than others, yet users of all types can benefit from the advantages of a dedicated tool like such.

Windows comes with a built-in manager too, but some users may not find it ideal. As a third-party alternative, clippy aims to be a clipboard assistant of sorts: it’ll keep track of your entries, be they in text or image form, and even let you search through them if there’s anything of importance to be found.

Designing an app that is easy to reach, practical, while also featuring all the functions a user would need, is surely a challenge. What you get here is an app that keeps it simple, but not necessarily to the detriment of functionality: you press a hotkey, and the manager will pop up near your Systray, letting you access whatever you need from your clipboard.

Once the tool is running, it’ll start recording any copy events to your clipboard and log them appropriately. Everything is stored locally, so you shouldn’t have any qualms about privacy.

The tool will keep track of copied text and images, though in the case of the latter, I found it inconsistent when it came to copying photos from the system, as they would display as blank thumbnails on the interface. It worked fine when copying stills from the web, however.

More important entries can be favorited, or starred, and sent to the Starred Clipboards menu for easier access. The program is quite accommodating of hotkeys, which you can modify as you see fit. As such, you’ll be able to have even quicker access to the Recent and Starred Clipboards menu, as well as your item history.

I liked being able to activate the interface with the hotkey, then navigating to my desired menu at the press of a button: CTRL+Y to open the interface, then H to navigate to my History and start typing for a specific entry.

Setting up backups to a cloud service is possible, but I’d say it’s more of a bare-bones integration overall. The user can synchronize their clipboard history if they have the solution of a cloud provider on their system by specifying the location of their cloud-synced folder.

clippy is a clipboard manager that keeps it simple and succeeds. I’d like to think that any user can benefit from a tool like this: you never know when you might need an earlier clipboard entry, after all.