Thankfully, now we have apps that we can highly recommend to resolve this particular problem with copy and paste history once and for all. So knowing how to see previous copied items on Mac is essential, and developers have been working on numerous solutions - known as clipboard managers - designed to solve this for years. A Mac clipboard is a transient memory function, only designed to hold one item at a time. Once you’ve copied something else, what you originally copied is lost. Try free ✕ How to view and manage clipboard history on macOS Such a pain! Unfortunately, even the most expensive Macs only have one clipboard. The problem is, we are so used to it, so used to skipping back and forth between tasks that once we’ve copied something, if we don’t paste it right away, we can lose it and need to start again. When you stop and think about it, copy and paste is remarkable (on a Mac: ⌘ + C to copy, then ⌘ + V to paste). Wherever we have an internet connection, we can share those creations or links with anyone else in the world. Control to know that once we’ve created something once - whether it’s a passage of text, an entire document, images, videos, music, code - we can replicate it, instantly and easily.

Instead of starting over, copy and paste gives us control and time.

But without such functionality, we’d have to start from scratch on whatever we are working on every time we’d need a duplicate. That may sound bizarre, considering how commonplace it is. Get Setapp, a toolkit with fixes for all Mac problemsĬopy and paste has been revolutionary for productivity.

Access copy and paste history mac