If you’re like most people, you’ve probably experienced that sinking feeling when you copy something important, only to accidentally copy something else and lose it forever. Windows’ built-in clipboard history is better than nothing, and there are tips you can use to get more out of the Windows clipboard, but it’s frankly pretty basic.
So if you’re still wrestling with Windows’ basic clipboard, constantly being slowed down or losing important text, it’s about time you considered this free upgrade.
Why ClipClip beats Windows clipboard
The default clipboard does the bare minimum
Windows’ built-in clipboard history, accessible by pressing the Windows Key + V, is fine for basic needs, but it’s quite limited otherwise. It only stores 25 items, doesn’t survive restarts, and offers zero organization. You can’t edit anything you’ve copied or search through clips.
ClipClip solves all these problems. You can save up to 1,000 items, which are saved and organized in the ClipClip manager and stay saved even after reboots. The program also works with everything: text, images, files, screenshots—even formatted content from Word or web pages.
To copy something you’ve pasted using ClipClip, you can open a special menu using the Ctrl + Shift + V shortcut by default. This brings up a list of your most recently copied items and lets you paste any of them using either your mouse, arrow keys, or by pressing the number key corresponding to the item you want to paste. You can also search for a specific item from within this menu.
There are built-in editors for specific file types that let you edit files without having to open dedicated programs. You can edit anything from messy text copied from a PDF, HTML, rich text, or even images that you’ve copied from anywhere. These editors are pretty basic, but they’re only meant for quick edits and work perfectly for that.
The entire experience feels snappy to use and doesn’t get in the way of you making the required changes. When you’re using individual programs to make these changes, you can spend a lot of time hopping between different applications without realizing it. Sure, you might have to open an image editor or Visual Studio Code now and then, but for the majority of basic text, code, and image edits, ClipClip’s editors work just fine.
- OS
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Windows
- Developer
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Vitzo
- Price model
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Free for personal use
ClipClip is a clipboard management software for Windows.
Features that actually speed up your day
Snippets, clipboard history, and organization that make sense for real work
ClipClip supports quite a lot of different “actions” you can take on the items you’ve copied. These usually include translating text, changing formatting and capitalization, extracting text from images, changing the color space of an image, resizing images, adding watermarks, converting currencies, and more.
On the organization front, you’ve got two folders to work with by default— Pinned Clips and Saved Clips. Pinned clips are especially helpful for items you constantly find yourself copying and pasting. Got email templates you use constantly? Pin them. Company addresses? Pin them. Code snippets? You guessed it—pin them. These favorites stay accessible forever, no matter how many other items you copy.
Saved clips, on the other hand, are saved as local files on your PC’s storage drive. These files can be accessed by other programs like image or text editors and can be used whenever, wherever you like. And if you’d like to have custom folders, ClipClip lets you make as many as you need.
You can also search through all your clips seamlessly using the search bar provided in the ClipClip manager or the paste menu. ClipClip also remembers what programs a particular item was copied from, so you can search through copied items by file type, context (program you copied the item from), date, or content.
Last but not least, ClipClip isn’t a bad screenshot management tool either. It features a pretty robust screenshot tool that lets you take screenshots of a specific window or area on your desktop with pixel-perfect accuracy. It’ll even handle screen recordings and GIFs of up to 60 seconds with no problems. Though you’ll have to use external programs if you want to edit those.
The program has tons of other features, such as cloud synchronization to keep your copied items synced between devices, a fair amount of customization options for hotkeys, options for image transparency on the clipboard, custom screenshot image title formats, and more. ClipClip also lets you export or import existing configurations so you can set it up within minutes on another machine if you’ve tuned it to your liking.
Not perfect, but pretty close
A few quirks aside, it’s one of the few clipboard tools worth installing
As good as ClipClip is, it’s not perfect. For starters, the user interface is rather old-fashioned. It’s perfectly functional, but it sticks out like a sore thumb on a modern OS like Windows 11. The built-in clipboard history viewer on Windows 11 actually looks a lot better than ClipClip’s paste menu. ClipClip’s interface also doesn’t seem to scale very nicely if you’re working on a multi-monitor setup with varying resolutions. It seemed fine on my 24-inch 1080p primary monitor, but the interface was unreadable on my laptop’s 14-inch 2.8k display.
Another problem is the shortcuts. The default Ctrl + Shift + V shortcut replaces the paste without formatting shortcut for a lot of text editors. I write most of my notes, articles, and other text in a Markdown editor and immediately had to change the default shortcut to avoid conflicts. There are ways to strip formatting when you copy and paste text, so the default shortcut can be a hit or miss based on the writing program you primarily use.
Several other shortcuts may or may not work if you’ve got custom shortcuts set up via tools like Microsoft PowerToys or AutoHotKey. There are also no prompts to indicate whether a shortcut you pressed worked or not. The program also has audio cues that play every time you copy or paste something. I’d recommend you turn these off as they can get annoying very quickly.
Time to ditch the boring Windows clipboard
Once you switch, you’ll wonder how you ever lived with Ctrl+C alone
Every minute you spend retyping information you’ve already copied is wasted time. ClipClip eliminates that waste with a tool powerful enough for professionals but simple enough for anyone to start using effectively in minutes.
Whether you’re handling customer support emails, writing code, managing documents, or just trying to be more efficient with your daily computer tasks, ClipClip has the potential to transform one of your most common activities—copy and paste—into something much more powerful.
Stop losing important data to Windows’ basic clipboard. Download ClipClip, spend a couple of minutes getting familiar with the interface, and watch your productivity soar.