A clipboard manager is a computer program that adds functionality to an operating system's clipboard. Many clipboards provide only one buffer for the "copy and paste" function, and it is overwritten by each new "copy" operation. The main task of a clipboard manager is to store data copied to the clipboard in a way that permits richer use of the data.
Contents
Clipboard managers enhance the basic functions of cut, copy, and paste operations with one or more of the following features:
Sharing clipboard contents remotely is sometimes done with pastebins.
Copy history
Most clipboard managers allow the user to keep multiple clipped objects, available for later use. Some keep a clipping history by automatically making a new buffer for each new cut or copy operation.
Some applications have an internal copy history feature. This has been a standard feature in UNIX editors like vi and emacs for some time. Recent versions of Microsoft Office have included the "Office Clipboard", a built-in clipboard manager, which operates as long as one of the Office suite applications is open.
Windows
The default Microsoft Windows clipboard manager enables pasting the copied data, even after an application is closed, by maintaining the clip buffer itself. Its copying and pasting operations are very versatile in what they permit to be transferred between applications. A range of cells clipped from an Excel sheet can be pasted as a table into MS Word, or OpenOffice.org. Formatted text clipped from a web page will become cells in an Excel sheet, a table in MS Word, or plain text in Text Edit. Windows does not offer a copy history feature. Users wanting this function use a third-party clipboard manager that replaces the default clipboard.
Mac OS X
Mac OS X also has a host of third-party options for clipboard management.
CopyPaste was the first (1997) multiple clipboard utility, the only for many years and is still actively developed. (Shareware) CopyPaste was first reviewed in 1997 by Tidbits.
Ten more are presented in a 2009 review article. A few of these are also mentioned in a paragraph of a 2014 article. From this list are:
Clipboard managers for Mac OS X use the Dock, status bar or Dashboard to integrate with the Mac Look and Feel.
Linux
The freedesktop.org Clipboard Manager specification describes a protocol layered on top of the ICCCM clipboard spec for client applications. A daemon process is responsible for storing clipboard contents. This daemon clipboard manager must be provided by the window manager running in the user's X session. The client-side specification has native support in a number of toolkits, including GTK+.
The Linux desktop environment KDE ships with Klipper.
GNOME provides a basic clipboard manager function as part of the gnome-control-center (accessed via the gnome-settings-daemon), that supports the freedesktop.org Clipboard Manager Specification.
Other clipboard managers available are: