When you’re learning and working on a Mac, you’ll often find yourself wanting to copy a piece of text, an image, or a file. However, after copying, the process is interrupted for some reason, and when you go back to the process and want to continue, you can’t remember what was copied to copy. It doesn’t matter. Alfred’s history allows you to remember everything you’ve done, and you can tell which program you copied it from.

Use the Alfred clipboard history

For privacy reasons, Alfred’s clipboard history is off by default. To use this feature, first turn it on in the Clipboard Settings panel. In Settings, check the option that you want to record, you can select text, pictures, and files, and you can specify the expiration time of each entry. After this function is enabled, you can open the clipboard history in two ways:

  1. Hotkey: The default hotkey is Option + Command + C. You can make changes in the Viewer Hotkey in the Settings panel;
  2. Keywords: It can be opened by entering a Keyword in Alfred’s input box. The default Keyword is Clipboard, which can be changed in the Viewer Keyword in the Settings panel.

When you open the Clipboard history panel with a hotkey or keyword, you can see a list of the snippet records you copied and enter strings to filter the results. When you select an item and press Enter, it will be copied again, and you can copy the item again. If “Auto paste on Return” is selected in advanced options, the selected items will be automatically pasted at the cursor position of the corresponding program after press Enter.

You can also use the keyword “clear” to clear the record list at any time, and you can select which time period to clear the records. Again, this Keyword can be modified in “Clear Keyword” in the Settings panel.

Shear plate merging

Sometimes when you’re browsing the web, one paragraph is really long, but you want to copy a few paragraphs and then link them together into a whole paragraph. You might want to copy and paste these pieces of text separately and synthesize them as a whole. But Alfred’s clipboard merge feature can help you get there in one step. Like clipboard history, this feature is off by default. 2) Outer-bound Fast Append Selected Text option on Clipboard configuration interface.

When you select a piece of text, hold Command, and then press C twice, you hear a cuckoo sound, which indicates that the selected piece of text has been automatically merged to the end of the previous record in the clipboard history. By repeating this, you can combine several pieces of text scattered in different places into a single text that can be selected and copied from the clipboard history.

Let me give you an example. For example, first copy the string “Fragment one”, open the clipboard history and you’ll see that “fragment one” already exists in the list,

Next, select the “fragment 2” string, hold Command still, press the C key twice in succession, and open the list of records again. You will find that “Fragment 2” is merged after “Fragment 1” to form a whole string.

If Place merged text back into macOS Clipboard is selected in the Settings panel, the merged text can be directly merged into the clipboard. Then press Command + V to directly paste the merged text. However, when pasting, you will notice that there will be Spaces between each entry, which can sometimes interfere with reading. It doesn’t matter. In the Settings panel, you can choose to separate additional items with Spaces, newlines, or no separation of items.

Some advanced options

The Alfred cut History also provides some advanced options for setting:

  • Auto paste on return: After it is checked, press Enter to paste the selected items into the corresponding program automatically;
  • Max Clip Size: When you often need to copy large segments of text, you can set the maximum length of the text snippet. When the copied text exceeds this length, Alfred ignores the following text;
  • Ignore Apps: Add the clipboard history to the Ignore Apps box when you don’t want to use the clipboard history for Apps such as passwords. Alfred won’t record the clipboard actions for those Apps.