ClipMenu: Clipboard History Manager for Mac OS X

ClipMenu is a clipboard history manager for Mac OS X. I’ve tried a lot of others, both paid and free, but for me this one is a keeper.

While not visually snazzy (and I think that’s one of the reasons I like it so much), ClipMenu has a very intuitive approach to managing your clipboard history, especially for us keyboard shortcut junkies. You can invoke it with a user-specified keyboard shortcut (I use Command-Option-V), select cliboard history items from the keyboard using Command-1, Command-2, and so on, and it even has a Snippets section where you can add folders of frequently used items. The latter being kind of like a TextExpander without the text shortcuts, if that makes any sense. But it comes in handy.

An advanced feature I don’t really use often but which looks really powerful is the Actions section. Basically, by adding a modifier key when clicking a clipboard history item, you can apply a javascript action to the pasted text. Some of the built-in scripts are things like: Paste As Plain Text; Surround with (which includes quotes, brackets, parentheses and so on); Capitalize, lowercase, UPPERCASE, and Title Case. If you know how to write javascript (which I do not), you can create your own.

I had a coder buddy whip up this one for me which I’ll share: a script that will change text-that-is-separated-with-dashes to Text That Is Separated With Dashes. Why did I want that? When posting images to sites like Flickr or Dribbble, I name my image files descriptively, and use the file names as the basis for the title of the image post. This saves me from re-typing it. You can download the Dashes to Spaces + Word Caps script if it sounds useful to you. Tell Greg Newman thanks if you find it handy.