What do you do most on your Mac besides type on the keyboard? Click, right? We point and click to make things work. What’s next? Copy and paste. Wouldn’t it be great to copy and paste and have your Mac always remember what you copied and pasted? Now it can.
Death by Clipboard
Mac OS X has a built-in memory that remembers what you copy or cut so you can paste it somewhere else. That’s what copy and paste is all about.
Most of us would be hard pressed to be as productive as we are were it not for the ever handy copy and paste capability in our Macs. We copy and paste URLs, text, images, email addresses, and more.
Once you’ve copied and pasted and copied again, whatever you copied previously disappears forever. That’s the down side of a good thing. Once you initiate the second copy on your clipboard, the first is gone.
Resurrection
Fortunately, some clever Mac software developers figured out a way to create multiple clipboards that remember what you copied, not just recently, but many copies ago.
One of my favorites is also free. PTH Pasteboard:
How often have you copied something only to find that you need it a few minutes later but you’ve already copied another item? PTHPasteboard watches you while you work and keeps a copy of any items that you have copied to your pasteboard.
PTH Pasteboard is a must have utility for your Mac. It is so elegant that Apple should include it in Mac OS X.
See the Light
Getting started is about as simple as a Mac utility can get. Download PTH Pasteboard from the PTH site.
PTH Pasteboard is a preference pane and downloads as a disk image. Double click to open the disk image, then double click on the preference pane to install.
Open your Mac’s System Preferences to get started.
The General setting tab allows you to stop and start PTH Pasteboard, set the number of copies to remember, and the maximum file size.
Nitty Gritty Prefs
The devil is in the details, right? In the Pasteboards tab you can create multiple pasteboards, set how many items to display, set the Menubar image, and more.
Whoa! What? Menubar? Yes, PTH Pasteboard resides in your Mac’s Menu bar as a little thumbnail tack. Click it and cool things happen.
PTH Pasteboard has a very handy dock that sits to the side of your Mac’s screen. Move the mouse pointer to it and it pops out.
See? That is very handy. No effort. No keyboard combination to remember. No clicking until you’re ready to grab whatever you lost. PTH Pasteboard’s copy window contains a copy of everything you copied, back to whatever number of items you set.
That’s it. It just works. It’s always there. Copy and paste as much as you wish, PTH remembers and stores each copy so you can retrieve anything you thought you lost.
Cool Limits
Yes, Virginia, there are limits to cool. PTH Pasteboard is cool and it is free. There’s also a professional version that unlocks a bunch of handy features.
For example, you can share and synchronize multiple pasteboards across multiple Macs on a network. Filters can also be added to transform text stored in PTH Pasteboard.
The PTH web site has a few Screencasts to show you how to use the Pasteboard, but you won’t need to watch it. It just works. Whatever you copy gets stored so you can select it and copy it again.
When I set up a new Mac, either for myself or a friend, this is one of the first utilities I install.